Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us for the WAM Alternative Assets full-year 2025 webinar. As you all know, this is your company, and we're pleased to provide you with the opportunity to ask any questions you want. I'm chairman of Wilson Asset Management, and I'm here in my capacity as that and a Director of WAM Alternative Assets. I'm also here with my fellow workmate, Nick Kelly, who runs the portfolio, and also Olivia Harris, who works at the Senior level in our Communications and Marketing team. I'll do a little bit of an introduction, then we'll pass over to Nick. Thank you already. We've had a lot of questions come in. Any other questions anyone has, please send them in, and we can try to answer them through the presentation. We're here to report on the full-year result to the end of June 2025, the year to June 2025. If you look at the portfolio performance, on the surface, you may not be overly excited. The portfolio was up a little over 5%, a reasonable result. Obviously, we would have all liked a lot better, a better percentage increase. You'd also see from the board's decision on increasing the dividend to probably above what the market was anticipating. That's really just a function of Nick, as the investment manager professional looking after the portfolio's confidence, and then the board's confidence in terms of being able to provide a growing stream of fully franked dividends to shareholders. In terms of the dividend going forward, the company is in a very pleasing position, a significantly better position than when Wilson Asset Management took over the management of this company. We're very optimistic that we'll be able to continue to provide solid dividends and growth in assets over the years ahead. In terms of dividends we've already paid since we took over managing the portfolio, it's a little under $0.30, and we're very pleased that we've been able to provide that to shareholders and look forward to continuing to grow the portfolio and grow the company's assets and grow the distributions over time. Why don't I pass over to Nick now, who'll just drill down a little bit further in terms of the underlying performance of the portfolio last year, this last financial year, and also trying to give you a bit of an idea of how the portfolio is positioned to perform in this current 12 months. Let's pass it over to you now. Thanks, Nick. Wonderful. Thanks, Geoff. Before we dig into that, I did want to just formally welcome Jacob to the WAM Alternative Assets investment team. I think many of you would have seen Jacob around the traps and also spoken to him on the phone. Jacob has been with us for four and a half years, working on WAM Alternative Assets in the background within the finance team, but joined the investment team back in February when I joined the business to help steward this portfolio, and he's across everything. We hadn't formally welcomed Jacob to the investment team, so I just wanted to do that there. Probably just to recap on the investment objectives for WAM Alternative Assets quickly, we're here to deliver consistent absolute returns through a combination of dividend yield and capital growth. Clearly, the role of alternatives within the portfolio is to provide diversification benefits away from equities and bonds. It's really about alternatives being a complement to your existing portfolio. I might move to the next slide, Olivia, please. Just in terms of the performance, and Geoff touched on this, we're really proud of the since inception performance since we took on this portfolio from Blue Sky Alternative Investments back in 2020. We delivered 8.9% per annum, and importantly, we've delivered that performance with significantly less volatility or risk than Aussie equities. If you dig into the performance a little bit more, as I said, Geoff alluded to this, the last couple of years have been a little weaker, and I guess the three key reasons for that are as follows. Firstly, performance in the first two years was particularly strong in the first year, in particular for private equity. When this company was initially IPO'd by Blue Sky Alternative Investments back in 2014, they invested all of that capital into private equity around that time. We had the experience where private equity managers tend to exit, or sell their good performing businesses first and then hold on to the ones that need a bit more work. That was why the performance was strong in that first year. The second reason is that water performed exceptionally well in these first couple of years when we took on the portfolio after having some, obviously, this period was, you know, we were pretty drought-stricken as a country. The water rights in this portfolio performed quite well, and they've been a bit of a detractor of late. We can talk about the outlook for water, which looks a lot more promising. The third element of that is the capital that was returned in those first couple of years was needed to be reinvested into new strategies. Those new strategies now make up over 80% of the portfolio. We do experience, when we invest into asset classes like private equity, the J-curve, and I'm sure many of you have heard this before. It does feel that we are now sort of outside, or coming out of that period where lots of these new investments are at the end of their investment period. We're starting to see those increases in valuations come through. The outlook going forward is far more promising for this portfolio following that revitalization phase that we've been through. Move to the next slide, please, Olivia. This is a bit of a snapshot of the WAM Alternative Assets portfolio today. You can see here the allocations to each of the asset classes on the left, and on the right-hand side is the split by the underlying investment theme. You'll all remember that we have a thematic investment approach to constructing the WAM Alternative Assets portfolio. On the left, in terms of the weights to each asset class, what's changed? Probably a couple of things to point out. The water entitlements, as I said, the outlook for water is strong, although we have been reducing the allocation there just to bring it down to a level that we're more comfortable with from a risk perspective. The strategic weight for water within this portfolio is around 10% to 15%. We're pretty comfortable with where that sits today. When we took this portfolio on back in 2020, water was close to 40% of the portfolio. We've brought that down and are very comfortable with where that sits. We have increased our real estate exposure. Last time we did the webinar, I think real estate was around 7% or 8%. That's up around just over 11% now, and that will grow to closer to 20% over time. We're seeing some really interesting opportunities in unlisted real estate at the moment. The unlisted real estate market hasn't caught up to listed real asset valuation. We think there's some real value there where we're buying good quality assets from motivated sellers. I'll talk about one of those examples shortly. We've slightly increased our private debt exposure, and that will edge towards 10% over time. Importantly, we are only doing corporate direct lending in this portfolio. We do not have any real estate debt exposure. There are some cracks in that space. We will continue to monitor that. There might be a time in the future where we do come in if it is exceptionally cheap to come in, but we're just watching that space for now. Finally, on the cash balance, the cash balance has reduced a little bit and will continue to reduce, which is great. That is off the back of increased transaction activity in the market. We are going to put in place a treasury tool. We've spoken about this before. That will go live in the next month or so just to make that cash balance work a little harder. That will add around 50 to 60 basis points to performance for the vehicle over time, which we think is important. Now, the portfolio, I guess the output of the portfolio looks like this in terms of the split across our different investment partners that we have. As you can see, this is on a fully invested basis. If all of our cash was called today, this is what the portfolio would look like. We're very comfortable with the portfolio as it looks today and the outlook across the asset classes. There is around 18% of the portfolio left in legacy assets, and they will come back to us over the next 12 months. As an example, January Capital is our venture capital legacy exposure. Those businesses are actually performing quite well, and they'll be exited over the next 12 months or so. Equally, the agriculture exposure will come back as well. These are specialist investment managers. They are specialists in each of their asset classes, and they complement each other in the portfolio. I think that's a really important point that we do spend a lot of time when designing this portfolio on portfolio construction, as well as obviously backing the very best investment managers where we have conviction in their skill set. Groups like Crescent Capital in private equity, for example, are healthcare private equity specialists. Adamantem Capital has a strong sustainability focus and focus on consumer discretionary businesses. Allegro Funds is focused on services and turnaround businesses, right? They all provide something different to the portfolio. Importantly, the split between the growth and defensive elements as well is an important point to highlight. The defensive elements in blue here are really important to provide income to the portfolio, which allows us obviously to pay out a consistent, growing dividend yield, but also as a lever for risk management within the portfolio. The growth elements obviously provide us capital growth over time. Just on this slide, I mentioned increasing our exposure to real estate, and we've been finding some really interesting opportunities in this space. This is one of the assets that we have recently co-invested on alongside our investment partner, Wentworth, which is 100 Harris Street, just here in Sydney in Pyrmont, just down the road from UTS. For those of you from Sydney who know the area, this was the old wool sheds. The building was actually built in the 1890s and has been refurbished since. This building was actually bought by Wentworth off DEXUS balance sheet. It was considered a non-core asset by DEXUS. The team have bought this asset for around $235 million. It was valued at around $280 million on DEXUS books and was at one point valued at $350 million about 18 months ago. That just gives you a sense of where valuations are and how much cheaper they are than they were. Importantly, they've bought this on an 8.5% yield. There's a five-year weighted average lease length on the property. There are rent guarantees in place from DEXUS for the first 12 months. The asset will be located next to the Pyrmont Metro Station, which will open in a couple of years, and also comes with adjacent land. They've bought this at 35% below replacement value. As I said, cracking asset, really good quality property, strong income yield in the portfolio, and we're buying it off motivated sellers. We continue to see these sorts of opportunities. When we're co-investing on these assets, we're accessing them at significantly reduced fees, which is important as well. We're going to continue to see more of these, and that gives us immediate deployment, and we'll see our real estate exposure continue to grow in the portfolio. Evolving share register dynamics. This is something that Marty and I touched on when we ran the webinar a couple of months ago. I think this is an important one. When we took on this portfolio from Blue Sky Alternative Investments back in 2020, we knew that the investment portfolio needed work, and we've been through that revitalization phase. As I said, we're now moving into the growth phase for this company. We also knew the income needed work, right? When we took this on, we were looking at a potential dividend cut, and we're really pleased that we've been able to grow those dividends over time, and we've still got a healthy profit reserve there for dividends in the future. The third element was the register. We probably, I think, perhaps even underestimated how much work would be required on the register over time. We're pleased to say that as of today, the register is in a far better place. 70% of the register as it is today are new investors since Wilson Asset Management took on the management of this company back in 2020. 45% of the register hold multiple WAM listed investment companies, and more than 30% of the register hold three or more WAM LICs. I think that's really important to highlight because it is very much a WAM-aligned register. The conversations I've had with many of you have been around the benefit of alternatives in your portfolio and what this portfolio can provide you. It does feel like there's really strong support, and the outlook for alternatives is really, really positive. I'm really excited by the future for Alts. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Geoff. We've obviously got an important vote coming up at the AGM in October on the premium target. Geoff's going to touch on that now before we go to questions. Back to you, Geoff. Look, thanks very much, Nick. People may know or may not know that when we took over the management of this portfolio, one of the parts of the agreement was that after five years, we'll go to shareholders and just check to see how they are in terms of us continuing to manage the portfolio and actually the company continuing. The vote is broadly, will the company continue or be liquidated? If that's the case, then of course, we won't be manager initially, and then the company will be liquidated. Broadly, that's the vote. One of the votes is resolution four, the independent directors, and that's excluding myself and Adrian, who aren't seen as independent. They are of the view that the company should continue on. Obviously, we're of the view that the company should continue on rather than be liquidated. We can go through that in a bit of detail a little later. Broadly, as you know, these are medium-long-term investments. If effectively the company's being liquidated, then the result for shareholders is going to be a lot, you know, as a sizable shareholder myself, I don't believe it'll be a good result. Again, it's up to you to vote at the upcoming AGM. Of course, we'd like you to vote for, to continue the company, vote for, so sorry, vote against, which is actually voting for the company to continue. It's to vote against resolution four. That's pretty much that. I'm sure it'll come up in Q&A. From our perspective, we've been able to continue to grow that dividend since we took it over. As Nick pointed out, the share register has changed significantly. I saw one of the questions came in. It's talking about listed investment companies trading at premiums and discounts. We've been able to continually get ours trading at premiums, taking over effectively Blue Sky Alternative Investments' listed investment company. We all know Blue Sky Alternative Investments was in a pretty bad way. It's taken us quite a bit of time to tighten up that share register. We now think we're very close to having it in a really good space. As Nick mentioned, I think 77% of the shareholders are now, have come on since we've been involved with the company. Broadly, they're supporting what we're doing. Yeah, if you're looking at, you know, pure supply and demand, you'd say if another, you know, 10% or so of the, you know, shareholders came on because they're supporting us, then you'd assume that you're getting close to trade at NTA, if not a premium. From our perspective, the longest LIC it took us to get to trade at a premium NTA was WAM Research, which took us seven years. The fortunate or unfortunate thing is we were probably too successful in terms of, you know, what we phrase as tightening up the share register, getting, you know, the people that want to be invested in that type of company. The company probably, I think it was only three or four years ago, actually went to over a 50% premium NTA. Now, sort of a 13% or 14% discount, you know, which is where WAM Alternative Assets is at the moment, is as crazy as a 50% premium. Maybe the 50% premium is crazier. That's sort of what happens. You know, when all the shareholders are happy with what you're doing and supportive of it and are not sellers, then new buyers, when new buyers turn up, they've got to pay NTA or a premium NTA. Why don't I now pass over to Olivia, who'll take you through, we'll go through the Q&A. Thanks, Geoff, and thanks everybody for sending in your questions. Before we jump into questions, you'll see on your screen some QR codes to register for our WAM Alternative Assets Meet the Manager event. We would love for you to join us if you're in Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney, or Melbourne on those below dates. We'll leave that on the screen for a little bit so you can scan it, and we'll jump into questions now. Our first question is from Ian. With the change in portfolio management at WAM Alternative Assets from one manager to another, what has changed and why? Do you want me to take this one, Geoff? Yeah. I think so. Yeah, I mean, why don't you have a go? If I need to add anything, I'll come in from the board's perspective. Perfect. I think the primary change from an investment perspective is that when Blue Sky Alternative Investments were managing this vehicle, they were investing into underlying Blue Sky funds only across agriculture, water, private equity, and venture capital. Right. Under the management of Wilson Asset Management, we've broadened the investment approach. We're able to invest with any specialist investment manager across a broader set of asset classes. Whilst we still invest in some of those asset classes, we've also added infrastructure, real estate, and private debt into the mix to give a broader alternatives exposure to investors, and importantly, with specialist managers. In some ways, Blue Sky Alternative Investments was somewhat constrained to their own underlying strategies, whereas we have a probably more unconstrained mandate with respect to the investment approach that we're taking. Importantly, through that period as well, we've been able to grow the dividend yield for investors. As I said, that sits at a very healthy number now, and we've got over two and a half years of dividend coverage as well, which is important. Geoff, anything else to add from a board perspective? In terms of from the board's perspective, it's always been important to have a high-quality individual managing the portfolio since the Wilson Asset Management team got involved. In the early days, Adrian, who was helping negotiate with Blue Sky, who is on the IC and also on the board, then we brought on Dania to manage the portfolio. She's taken a new job on nine to five. She still remained on the IC, which is great from our perspective because we've still got access to the intellect. Nick's come on board. Nick has actually known Dania for quite a period of time and worked with her. Is it 10 years worked with? We've done that, yeah, long period of time. Yep. Yes, yes. All known forces from our perspective have the abilities to really manage the portfolio as it should be on behalf of all shareholders. Thanks. Thank you. The next question is from Leon. The ASX announcement of August 28 had some very encouraging quotes from Nick regarding the revitalization strategy and enhancements to the portfolio. Would you be able to expand on those comments, please, so as to give shareholders a better understanding of how things are developing at WAM Alternative Assets? It all sounds very promising. Congrats to Nick and the team. Thank you very much. Yeah, look, it is exciting. I guess the outlook across all of the asset classes we're investing in is particularly strong. It's sort of odd to find a time where everything looks pretty attractive. Transaction activity in private equity has picked up relative to where we were at this point last year and the year before, which is great. Our private equity managers have been acquiring more businesses and also looking at some potentially early exits on the portfolio as well, which is important. We had one of those exits earlier this year from Adamantem Capital, one of our investment partners who sold in Services Australia, and they did exceptionally well out of that deal. Seeing more transaction activity in private equity, which is great, and that's been buoyed on as well by the recent RBA rate cut. Seeing some more attractive deals in that space. I mentioned real estate. Obviously, I think that the real estate space, the unlisted market in particular, looks really attractive in terms of the entry point from a valuation standpoint. As I said, it hasn't caught up to listed markets yet, so expect some value to come through there. Water rights, another asset class that obviously we've got significant exposure following a pretty dry summer and the government buyback of the water entitlements through the Murray-Darling region. We're starting to see pressure on water prices. To give everyone a sense of that, water allocations are now at around $250 to $300 a megaliter for water through that region. They were at $50 to $70 this time last year. They were at $700 back in 2021, so there's room to move. The valuers are starting to look at the valuation of the entitlements following the government buyback. Effectively, that buyback takes supply out of the market. There continues to be demand for water from the large irrigators and farmers, so that's putting upward pressure on pricing, which is a tailwind for the water in this portfolio. Private debt continues to be a really attractive opportunity set as the banks continue to step away from certain types of lending. As I said, we've brought in a new investment partner in Longreach in the portfolio. Infrastructure as well continues to tick along and do really, really well, providing really strong inflation linkages. It's sort of across the board. It does seem like it's a big ripe investment period for private markets. In particular, the transaction activity picking up across the board is a real tailwind, which is great. Thanks, Nick. The next question is from Mark. How are asset valuations in the less liquid assets in the portfolio holding up? Are there any newer types of holdings that you are considering? For those you have decided against, what are the primary reasons for that decision? Yes, good question. I guess two parts to that. The first one on the valuations. Valuations are holding up really well. We've just worked through our year-end valuation process, which is a fairly rigorous process given that we are a listed company with audited accounts. We reviewed approaches and policies of our underlying investment managers and all the valuations on the underlying assets to get comfortable. The vast majority of the underlying companies have been externally valued. We're very comfortable with the valuations, and we've started to see increases across the board, which is great. Valuations are holding up, very comfortable that the valuations are appropriate. Obviously, we've had exits on the portfolio at those valuations or premiums to those valuations in the past as well. In terms of things we're looking at that we've seen that we've said no to, I guess there's a range of reasons why that can be. We saw a co-investment. We looked at a co-investment recently with one of our private equity investment partners, which was in the carbon offset market. We actually already have exposure to a similar sort of business through one of our other investment partners, so we didn't need more exposure there. We didn't feel like the returns on offer were commensurate with the risk profile of the business. From memory, it was a very early-on business. There was a fair bit of risk attached to it, and the return expectations were only two to two and a half times money. We would expect more like three times money multiple. Every week, we continue to get offered strategies in, say, real estate debt and structures like that. The private debt market, you've all heard me talk about it before, has some challenges, and we're very cautious around that. We don't, as I said, have any real estate debt exposure in the portfolio. The only private debt exposure we have is to ICG and Longreach on the corporate side. Importantly, the addition of Longreach, we did that because of the strength of their workout experience. As I said to everyone before, this is really critical, right? It's very easy to go and underwrite a loan. It's a different thing to work it out when it goes pear-shaped. Backing managers in this space that have considerable workout experience is absolutely critical, and this team has this in spades. We will only back those sorts of groups and these asset classes. The other reason we've said no to things is just availability of cash. All of our cash has now been committed for private equity strategies that will be invested over the long term. We obviously need to work through that approach to sort of cash flow profiling and modeling to marry up when we expect to get cash back on the private equity side of the portfolio and the exits, and also when we're going to get called on capital. That ensures that we end up with a fairly linear deployment profile over time, which is what we're looking for within this portfolio. Thanks, Nick. That flows nicely to our next question on cash from Rob. WAM Alternative Assets holds a lot of cash. Where is this invested, and how much does it earn? Could some of the future commitments not be covered at least in part by future cash flows? Yeah, really good question. The current cash is a mix of both cash on hand and term deposits, which are earning sort of 3.5% to 4%. That's obviously coming in following the recent rate cut. What we are working on is implementing a treasury tool where all of that cash will be managed by a manager investing into investment-grade credit. That will yield around cash plus 300. We've talked about this previously that this is an important element of the portfolio. We will always have a cash balance. We expect the cash balance to come down from where it is, and it's already started to trend down. I think in the last webinar, it was closer to 20%. The long-term cash holding will be around 10% to 15%. Over the next year, we expect it will trend down further as we are called for our private equity commitments, which is good. We're getting more of that cash invested. Nonetheless, we will be putting in place that treasury tool to manage that cash and just make the portfolio work harder. That's a really important point. The question around can it not just offset the, you know, the capital commitments offset the calls on the cash coming back on the other side? Yes, absolutely. That is the intention. The challenge we have, I guess, firstly, historically, the portfolio, you know, we had to work through this revitalization process. We needed to be quite conservative in the way in which we managed the portfolio, and we needed cash available to go after new opportunities. That was, I guess, part of the reason for that historically. Looking forward, the other challenge we have is timing. To give people a sense of it, when we commit capital to a manager, they will obviously call that down on us over a three to four-year period. Typically, we are given 10 days to make good on that capital commitment, and that is a legally binding commitment. We don't know when the cash is going to be coming back from other private equity managers who are selling businesses. That mismatch we need to manage, and hence why we spend a lot of time managing cash flow within our portfolio to ensure that we are making the portfolio work as hard as possible, but also not put in jeopardy our ability to meet those capital calls in the future. Thanks, Nick. We'll stick with Rob's question. When you show a graph as to where the assets are invested, why do you not allocate private equity to more specific areas such as employment services? Private equity is very broad. It is. We internally, obviously, cut, slice, and dice it a lot of different ways. I guess this is all about managing the communications we provide investors, but more than happy to provide you, Rob, with a bit more detail around the split. We have a fairly diversified sector split within private equity. The major sectors that we have exposure to are healthcare, healthcare services in particular, industrials, some consumer discretionary, and also financial services in the portfolio. Importantly, there's probably a skew towards healthcare, industrials, manufacturing, which is a really neat complement for typically what investors access through listed equity markets. If you look at your typical exposure through, say, the ASX 50, the ASX 100, it is a neat complement to that. We do have fairly diversified exposure across those sectors, and each of our managers will typically have a specialization in those sectors. Groups like Crescent, as I said, in private equity, largely focus on healthcare-related businesses. Adamantem Capital focused on consumer businesses and IT services as well. Groups like Allegro Funds on service-orientated businesses. We do have a split across the board, and we can happily provide that additional detail after this if that's helpful, Rob. Thanks, Nick. We'll turn to Geoff now. Geoff, a question from Dennis. Like many LICs, WAM Alternative Assets trades below NTA. Can you make any observations on this? Yeah, the main observation is, when we took over, I think it was trading, it was over a 30% discount to NTA. It might have been 36% or 33%. That was because, you know, why was that the case? Because effectively shareholders had given up on the company. They were prepared to sell the assets over 30% below what they're worth. Nick mentioned earlier how, since we took over the management nearly five years ago, with effectively shareholders that have seen what we've done with other LICs and want to get exposure to this very unique product, the one of it, the only one of its kind in the Australian stock market, they've been buying. Effectively, the shareholders that had been in there probably from the early days at Blue Sky, they had been selling. They'd given up and they wanted to move on. That just takes a period of time. Pretty much 70% of the portfolio has changed. That's new people that have bought since we've been involved. It just takes time for that share register to continue to change. Eventually, you get to a tipping point where the share price trades at NTA. The share price, the discount to NTA has declined significantly from that 30% plus to, I think, around that 12 or 13% now. I'm very confident that it'll trade at a premium. It's just taken a little bit longer now than we initially anticipated. If you look at other listed investment companies, our various listed investment companies, we've got nine of them. I think four or five of them are trading at NTA or if not premiums, and a few of them are discounts. This is the biggest discount of all our LICs. We're pretty confident that we will get it to trade at NTA if not a premium. That's pretty much the answer there, I think. Olivia. Thanks, Geoff. We'll stick with you for this next one from Trent. With the vote occurring due to the fund not reaching NTA, why has the board not used any of the capital to buy back shares as capital has come back? The question is probably simply put: why over the last five years, why hasn't there been a buyback? It probably comes back to expectations. Do buybacks work? You'll find with operating companies, buybacks work, but with listed investment companies, buybacks actually don't work. The logic is you're buying a dollar of assets, say at the moment for $0.13. If you bought back 10% of the company, the NTA of the company would increase by 1.3%. It would effectively cost shareholders nothing. What it does do is reduce the liquidity. If I had a room of, say, a thousand LIC investors and I asked them who likes buybacks, I'd say 10% of them would put up their hand. The other 90% wouldn't put up their hand. The reason they wouldn't put up their hand is they actually want the investment manager to get better than, say, a 13% or 14% return. They're investing to get 20% or 30% returns over time. What happens is when you shrink a company, it's very hard to shrink a company to greatness. We've found that, say, with WAM Capital, when we floated it, we started it, we raised, it was a prospectus for $20 million. We raised a fraction over that. For the first two years, it traded as low as a, sorry, as big a discount as 20%. It then went to a premium. For a long period of its life, it's either traded at a small discount or a premium NTA once the register has been settled down. That's what we've found with WAM Research. I mentioned it went to a 50% plus premium after being at a discount for seven years. Now it's still trading at a premium, not that magnitude. Our expectations, you think of this company, how do you get exposure to these opportunities as a retail investor? It's actually impossible. Once we've been able to tighten up this share register and it's trading close to NTA, if not a premium NTA, I think it'll be more structural long term. One of the interesting things is probably what's held the company back over the last year is this vote coming up. We've had a lot of large financial planners that have told us, "Hey, look, we're very interested in what you're doing." You know, we'd like to have this as our alternative asset play. We're not actually prepared to buy it because there's uncertainty because of the vote. We all know, we've all been in the markets long enough. The market does not like uncertainty. Once this vote's out of the way, then everyone knows that we're not going to have another vote. There's not going to be this period of uncertainty. Will the company survive? Will it not? Will it be liquidated? Will it not? If it's liquidated, how much money will we get back? Will we get back less than the assets that are there, less than what it's actually currently trading at? You might have to, the liquidator will sell the assets cheaply. You'll get the money, you might get the money a little bit now, a little bit in three years' time, four years' time, five years' time, ten years' time. To me, once that's off the table, and that's why we brought the AGM forward. We normally have our AGMs in November. There was just too much uncertainty with WAM Alternative Assets, and we just wanted to go for the vote. Let shareholders decide if they want the company to continue and prosper, then vote for that. That is voting against resolution four. If you want the company to be liquidated, then vote for resolution four. That just removes that level of uncertainty. Thanks, Olivia. Probably a longer answer than normal. That's okay. Thanks, Geoff, for the detail. We'll go back to Nick for this next one from Ben. Are there any pockets of the alternative investment landscape that you're particularly interested in over the next six to 12 months? Yeah, so I guess I've touched on some of them. Probably if we dig down a little deeper, say within real estate, for example, I talked about sort of quality real estate that we're buying at distressed pricing. Some of the sectors we're looking at there, we've just undertaken a co-investment with Wentworth, that investment partner, on a life sciences asset located in Quarry Park. That's a really high-quality asset, and that's a sector that is a fairly newish sector to the Australian market, and there's strong demand from tenants. That sector's particularly interesting for us at the moment, as is logistics and industrial pricing, and also other sectors where there's just distressed pricing in the market. We're continuing to see some pretty interesting opportunities in private equity with IT services businesses. Effectively, think of these as services businesses where there is greater reliance on technology and less on a labor force, if you like. Labor is obviously expensive, and these businesses tend to do quite well, especially during a period that we've incurred in recent times. Those sorts of businesses are tipping along well. I talked about obviously the outlook for water and private debt. There are pockets across all the asset classes we invest in where there are some really interesting opportunities that are coming to us from our underlying investment managers. Thanks, Nick. The next question is from Neil. Is the water fund still viable after four years of heavy rains, full rivers, and irrigated pastures? Short answer is yes. Thankfully, it has turned a bit of a corner. This time, obviously last year, water pricing was pretty depressed. That number, as I quoted before, water pricing is now up. We saw strong performance for water through the month of July, and we expect that to continue. We're seeing also strong demand from irrigators on the leasing of allocations as supply is being taken out of the market with this government buyback of the entitlements. We're starting to see the impact of that pricing come through. The valuers in the water market have wanted to see some sort of secondary pricing impact where there's been trading activity of water entitlements between two parties other than the government. We're starting to see that, and that pricing is sort of 10% to 20% above where we've seen entitlement pricing previously. The combination of both the government buyback and obviously the fairly dry summer that we've had recently through that region has meant pricing is firming and acting as a bit of a tailwind for water in the portfolio. I do appreciate the last few years up until now, water has struggled. It does feel like, as Marty said, with these water ponds, the tide is turning and it feels like we're heading for a more positive outlook for water in the future, which is good. Thanks, Nick. Sticking with you, the next question is from Philip. How do you select investments for WAM Alternative Assets? If you use third-party advisors, how much do they charge? Yeah, so look, we select investment managers based on the relationships we have in the market. We don't use external advisors to sort of introduce us to managers. We don't pay a fee to advisors for that. This is all I've done for the better part of two decades. We're able to leverage the industry relationships we have to, I guess, generate new investment ideas and invest into investment strategies offered to us by investment managers. Let's bear in mind the strategies that we're investing in are institutional strategies and often only available to institutional investors as well, not all of them, but the vast majority. That is an important, I guess, competitive advantage of this product versus investors trying to do this themselves, which is effectively near impossible for many of the strategies that we're investing in. We do have an investment committee. Geoff referenced that before. We've got four members of the investment committee. They are paid a fee for participating in that. They will have a say on all new investment strategies that are added to the portfolio. They act as a bit of a devil's advocate, which is a really good, I guess, governance exercise for us as the investment team to go through that process. We'll also involve them on individual co-investments. We've got expertise on that investment committee covering all of the asset classes we invest in with people like Adrian, given his private equity background, Sally with her real estate background, and obviously Dania with her full background on the portfolio and in particular across infrastructure. That is a really important part of the process, ensuring only the very best investment managers are added to the portfolio over time. Thanks, Nick. Sticking with you and some questions from Philip. Thank you, Philip. Would you consider investing in intellectual property assets? Interesting. Yes. A lot of the IP assets we tend to see tend to be sort of royalty structures. We have looked at royalties before. Yes. I think that's one of the great benefits of the WAM Alternative Assets investment mandate is its breadth. We don't have to fall in love with one sector. I've talked about there's obviously tailwinds behind many of the sectors at the moment. If, say, water wasn't in favor, we can tilt the portfolio to an asset class that is more in favor, such as real estate at the moment. Infrastructure did well for us during a high inflationary period. We might tilt back away from that. I think the breadth of the opportunity set in alternatives is extremely wide and it continues to broaden. We're seeing new asset classes pop up almost what feels like weekly. I mean, private debt, if we're speaking about it five to ten years ago, people would be saying, "What's that?" Now there's however many hundred managers running around in Australia with private debt strategies. The opportunity set continues to broaden. I think that that is one of the great attributes of the strategy. The short answer is, yep, we'd absolutely look at it. Now it needs to stack up against everything else in the portfolio. We have a sort of competition for capital model here when we're allocating, right? It's not just a, "Oh, this looks pretty good. Let's go and allocate capital here." We need to look at the underlying risk and return drivers of the strategy, not just in isolation, but how does that look when it's included within our portfolio? Then how is it appropriately sized? We don't want a situation where we've got hundreds and hundreds of underlying managers and strategies where our allocation sizes are, you know, immaterial. Equally, we don't want to take a 50% stake in one asset, obviously, right? There's quite a bit of work that we do around portfolio construction in designing this portfolio to be diversified, but also have sufficient enough weightings to the strategies where we have the, I guess, the best outlook in terms of generating the best risk adjusted returns for shareholders. Thanks, Nick. We'll stick with you before going back to Geoff. The next question is from Dennis. Why invest in real estate when WAM Alternative Assets is supposedly alternative assets? There are many other ways to invest in real estate. Yeah, so I guess this comes down to sort of what is alternative assets, which I feel like we could have an hour's discussion on the definition of alts. Our view is that real estate and infrastructure, being those who are asset classes making up the real assets piece, are alternative assets. Now, to be clear, the real estate assets that we're investing in here are extremely different to the real estate exposure that most of us have, which is to residential real estate, typically in the Australian market. We're accessing assets here via an investment partner that is only available to institutional investors. Things like commercial office property, investing in private hospitals. We're investing in asset classes within the real estate sector that are largely inaccessible to retail and wholesale investors and investing in just institutional funds and sectors such as life sciences as well. Strong thematic tailwinds. As I said, we are increasing our exposure. It's not going to be, you know, 50% or 60% of the portfolio, to be clear. It's currently 11.3% of the portfolio. It will tick up closer to 20%. Importantly, we're not investing in, I guess, the sector that most of us would have exposure, which is the traditional residential sector in the Australian market. Thanks, Nick. We'll go back to Geoff for some questions. Geoff, this next one is from Jeremy. Does WAM Alternative Assets have any plans to either move to paying monthly distributions or increase the overall returns to investors, similar to the approach announced by the Pengana PIA LIC, where they will be borrowing to buy into private credit? Yeah, as in WAM has a monthly income LIC, which is WAM Income Maximizer, which we floated a couple of months ago, and that trades under the code WMX. Pengana, which another one of the WAM entities is a shareholder in, that's WAM Strategic, that's WAR, because Pengana trades at quite a discount. A lot of people that I've spoken to on the Pengana proposal, first of all, I'm in favor of them going to monthly income. I actually think that is positive for shareholders. We are looking at how WMX performs, and there are some slightly additional costs in going to monthly income. I think it ends up being about $70,000 or $80,000 additional a year, because instead of sending two dividend checks, you're sending 12 dividend checks. From our perspective with Pengana, we've put up some people to go on the board of Pengana. The reason we've done that is since we've been shareholders over the last sort of 10 years, they've changed the strategy a number of times. Currently, it was, you're investing in global equities. Now it's become global private credit, and it's got debt as well. The really additional asset categories they're going into and gearing on top of that. The various shareholders that I've spoken to aren't that happy about that. Let's see how shareholders, obviously would like, if you're a shareholder, please, you know, vote for us at the upcoming AGM and AGM. Thanks, Geoff. This next question is from David. Nick, I think you can cover this one. Given the nature of WAM Alternative Assets assets, is there a reduced capacity to pass on franking credits compared to, say, WAM Capital or WAM Leaders? No, it's obviously different. We don't own listed equities that can be bought and sold each day. Obviously, franking can be passed on when there are realized gains. We do have income that we generate that is a realized gain in the portfolio. That comes from our private debt exposure and also our infrastructure and real estate portfolios. We have income coming through those parts of the portfolio. Clearly, when we have exits on the private equity portfolio and other parts of the portfolio as well, that provides us realized gains, which we pay tax on. We obviously earn franking credits from there. It's clearly a bit different to the other WAM products, but we can absolutely generate the required franking to pay fully franked dividends over time to our shareholders. Thanks, Nick. The next question is from Graham. Are you interested in investing in the crypto markets or commodities? No, is the short answer at this stage. I'd say never say never. Those markets, obviously, crypto and areas like gold have performed exceptionally well of late and are pretty frothy. The old Warren Buffett quote of, you know, be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful sort of holds true. I think if things become depressed pricing, then maybe we look at things. At this stage, no, there's little interest in investing in those sectors at this stage within this portfolio. Thanks, Nick. The next question is from Philip. What% of the 100 Harris Street property does WAM Alternative Assets own? We've co-invested directly on the asset. We've invested $5 million directly into the asset. The asset is also held within the Wentworth Private Equity Real Estate Fund 1, which we are invested in. The combined interest of those two would be, we've done $5 million on the co-investment, WMA's portion. That's 2% of our fund, and we probably have another sort of 0.5% through the fund investment. Obviously, that's a small portion of the overall asset. Wentworth have invested in this asset. They've obviously used a combination of equity and debt to fund the asset, and they have invested alongside Assembly Funds Management, which is the family office for the Lowey family. They have co-invested alongside. They're the two investors in it. Wentworth is the asset manager. They manage the property on a day-to-day basis, and we, as I said, we have a direct holding. When we size our co-investments, we don't want less than 1% of the fund's assets being invested into co-investment. Otherwise, it's sort of a matter of why bother. It becomes too immaterial. Equally, we don't want any more than, say, 3% of the fund's assets being invested to any single asset. Otherwise, we can end up with some significant concentration risks. We're very comfortable with the sizing of it in the context of the WMA portfolio. Thanks, Nick. Our next question is from Vincent. With our private equity deals, do we get materially better pricing than the 2 and 20 that they normally charge investors? Really good question. Some of them, yes, some of them, no. Some of the best private equity managers in the country do not struggle to raise capital, and they continue to command those sort of fee levels. Importantly, when we access co-investments with them, we are accessing co-investments either on a fee-free basis or half fees. We're getting those at significantly reduced fees, which is really, really important. For some of those private equity managers, we're paying more like 1 to 1.5, not the full 2 and 20, but some of them we are still paying 2 and 20. As I said, the very best, there's a small number of high-quality private equity groups in this market that have delivered strong performance over the last decade or two, and they do command those sorts of fees. As I said, we will use co-investments in the portfolio to give us both immediate exposure to underlying businesses that we like and also to reduce the overall fee load. Thanks, Nick. This next one is for Geoff from Trent. What is the optimal fund size? Is the dollars you have for a new position too small for some deals, or does the smaller size unlock some opportunities? I think that one's for Nick. It's part of me and part Nick. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Depending on what Trent's doing tomorrow at around 3:30 P.M., if he dials in for the WAR seminar, you know, that's WAM Strategic. We've got a chart that'll show you LICs trading at premiums and discounts. Will we be announcing that chart, Olivia? Yes, it gets announced at the ASX. Yes. Yeah, so he can look at the ASX announcement tomorrow. The interesting thing is most of the ones trading at discounts have a size of less than $500 million of assets, even though some of the bigger ones are trading at discounts. If you look at the grouping, you'll see it quite clearly on the graph, which ones are trading at premium and discounts. It actually does, and why is that the case? It's because self-managed superannuation investors are big supporters of listed investment companies. Also, there are various financial planners that are big supporters of listed investment companies. They know the great, I mean, some of the great assets that listed investment companies have that they can provide you with a closed pool of capital, the growing stream of fully franked dividends, etc., etc. What you'll find is that as you get closer to that $500 million mark, you sort of come into the realm of financial planners who want to put 1% or 2% of their clients' assets, say in alternative assets. They say, "Look, we'll just buy WMA." When they get a new client, they'll just go and buy some WMA. Now, if you're a really small listed investment company, say you're only $50 million of assets, then you really don't have that group of investors looking at you, the financial planners, even though currently there's some exceptional value there. To me, that's an interesting thing. In terms of investing the money, Nick, do you just want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. From a sizing perspective, on the investment side, at our current size, we're not missing out on anything, which is important. We are coming in as an institutional investor into each of these underlying investment strategies with our managers, which is really, really important. One for access, two for fees. Importantly, we're able to allocate small amounts of capital, which means we can be a bit more dynamic and we don't eat up too much of capacity from the managers. Equally, the opportunity set in alternatives is exceptionally broad. Obviously, we invest in a number of subasset classes and they could grow potentially over time. This portfolio could be significantly larger over time and we wouldn't run out of things to do. We are big enough to find really interesting opportunities. Often, some of the interesting opportunities tend to be in the small to mid-market, which is a bit less competitive than the larger trophy part of the market. Equally, given the breadth of the asset classes we're investing in, we can be a lot larger and we would like to be larger over time. Now, clearly, as Geoff alluded to, we won't go out and raise capital whilst trading at a discount. We do need to narrow the discounts, get WAM Alternative Assets trading up at a premium for a sustained period of time before we look to raise capital and hopefully grow the vehicle over time. Thanks, Nick. Geoff, we'll go back to you for this one. It's on PMC. Would you care to comment about PMC from a big picture perspective? I suppose the question there is, just to give the micro detail, PMC on the, is it the 1st of October? Have an AGM, and that's to change the board. I'm going up for the board, plus we've put another couple of independents. We're asking people to vote for us and to vote against the other independents that have been put up from L1. L1 is the fund manager that's taking over the management of Platinum. From a big picture perspective, to me, it's an illogical play. L1 is taking over the management of Platinum. They've bought a position in an LIC. As they're taking over Platinum, then they will be managing that LIC. They obviously didn't want the LIC to move into one of their trust structures to allow everyone to get out of NTA. They've told the board they're going to vote against that, the independent board. From our perspective, they're doing what we think isn't the right thing by all shareholders. That's why we've put our hand up there, similar to Pingana, because we don't think that's the right thing by all shareholders. PMC now currently has a modest management fee for global equities. Because it's underperformed, it's got significant underperformance. What L1 is proposing is they will significantly increase the management fee, I think, by 30% odd, maybe a little bit more. All the underperformance that unfortunately long-suffering shareholders have absorbed, L1 is going to get rid of that. We've said, "Hey, look, we'll put our board in place." That's why we're saying vote for us, because we will honor the underperformance, which is about $315 million odd of underperformance on a little over $400 million fund. We would only pay the low management fee that Platinum have, and manage the money similar to how Platinum's been managing the money, not in terms of performance, but in terms of structure, where the L1 guys, they're geared up up to three and a half times. You're taking significantly more risk. For shareholders, you're taking significantly more risk on that. From a big picture perspective, we're sort of putting our hands up for both, you know, Pengana, you know, to change the board at Pengana and change the board at Platinum, because we think, you know, what those companies, you know, what the companies are doing isn't in, you know, shareholders' interests. Someone, I was talking to a shareholder today and he said, "Hey, you're like, you know, the listed investment company cop." I said, "No, not necessarily. We just, you know, listed investment companies are our lifeblood. You know, we've, you know, we're probably one of the biggest players in the space by the number of LICs that we manage. We've taken over 13 of them. It's very important for the whole sector that people, you know, do the right thing by shareholders. In those instances, we believe that both companies, you know, or sorry, not necessarily the board, but the proposals that are going up to the board isn't in the best interests of shareholders. Thanks, Geoff. We have one final question from Robert for Nick. When will the AGM voting documents be sent out? Yes, it's a good question. AGM documents will be sent out to shareholders either Friday this week or next Monday, four weeks before the AGM, which is scheduled for the 9th of October. As Geoff said, this is your company. We would love to hear from you. Based on the discussions I've had with many of you, it does feel like there's strong support for the company, and I think everyone's pretty excited about the growth prospects. We would love to hear from shareholders. Please, please do vote. You can do that online through Boardroom, through registry, or in a paper copy. Everything will be sent out either back end of this week or the start of next week. Thank you very much, Olivia, and thank you very much, Nick, and thanks for all the shareholders. I know there's a lot of shareholders that sent their questions in beforehand and also have attended the webinar. This is your company, and we look forward to continuing having these webinars. That's assuming you all vote against, you know, res for all the other resolutions, but against resolution four. As Nick said, every vote does count. We're looking forward to continue to serve you as the manager of WAM Alternative Assets. Thanks very much.