TheChek News Flow

Fine porcelain maker Maruwa becomes the hottest bet for cooling AI data centres

Japanese ceramics manufacturer’s two centuries of pottery experience help it take the heat out of the latest technology

A Japanese company with more than two centuries of history in ceramic art and fine porcelain tableware has emerged as a surprise beneficiary of the rise of generative AI, electric vehicles and the technology sector’s intensifying war against heat.

Maruwa, which dominates globally in a range of specialist ceramics, has seen its shares almost double over the past year and leap to an all-time high since the start of April.

The Aichi-based company, virtually ignored by securities analysts previously, now has a market capitalisation of $28bn and has become the focus of a hefty report by Goldman Sachs, while other houses also say they are preparing coverage.

Their excitement is over how Maruwa has successfully transferred its traditional craftsmanship to the latest ceramic components. The company, once famous for exquisite dishes used in traditional Japanese banqueting, first moved into the business at the start of Japan’s “economic miracle” era in the 1960s. 

Its division produces ceramics for circuit boards and semiconductors and has a forte in materials used for heat dissipation in electronics operating at very high temperatures — the kind of temperatures prevalent in AI server farms and in the critically important inverter power modules of electric vehicles. 

Its hottest products in terms of demand currently are ceramic circuit boards used in high-speed optical communications, as tech giants build ever larger, heat-generating data centres as the hardware backbone of their generative AI projects.

“We expect that next-generation high-speed communications, including those related to generative AI, will be the biggest driver of our business growth over the next few years,” said Maruwa. 

Goldman Sachs analyst Mitsuhiro Icho calculates the company has 60 per cent of the global market for heat dissipation substrates for vitally important optical transceivers. He predicts this market will grow to be worth $12.3bn by 2027 as AI-related demand spirals.

Icho said Maruwa was insulated from competitors as it was “nearly impossible” for any non-ceramic supplier to enter the market at this stage by building a business from scratch. Its long history in ceramics had created deep competitive moats around the materials and the manufacturing processes. Its fundamental advantage, said Icho, was age.

“As the company has more than 200 years of history as a ceramic supplier, all the knowledge and technology accumulated since the early 1800s is the core competitiveness of the company,” he said.

Maruwa has been cautious in its sales forecasts, only raising them by a small notch in February for its financial year that ended in March. However, Goldman’s Icho believes its AI server-related sales of transceivers could have a compound annual growth rate of 60 per cent over the next five years.

However, its strong outlook now seems fully reflected in its shares, according to some analysts. In a note published last week by the UK-based boutique Storm Research, analysts argued that the significant recent increase in Maruwa’s share price meant its growth prospects had now been largely discounted by the market.

State media says Truong My Lan’s crimes eroded public trust in ruling Communist party

Vietnamese property tycoon Truong My Lan has been sentenced to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh City for embezzling more than $12bn in the country’s largest financial fraud, state media reported.  

Lan, 67, had committed crimes with serious consequences and with no possibility of recovering the lost funds, state media quoted the court verdict as saying on Thursday.

Her actions had also eroded the public’s trust in the leadership of the ruling Communist party and the state, it said.

Lan, chair of property developer Van Thinh Phat Group, was found guilty on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power following a trial that began last month. 

Lan had denied the charges against her. Her lawyer said Lan would appeal the verdict.

Lan was accused of embezzling 304tn dong ($12bn) from Vietnam’s Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SCB) by illegally controlling the bank through proxies, using “ghost” companies to take out loans and giving bribes of millions of dollars to government officials who discovered the fraud.

Other than Lan, a further 85 people have also been charged in the case, including central bank officials.

Authorities say SCB also gave loans worth more than $44bn to Van Thinh Phat and other companies controlled by Lan between 2012 and 2022, accounting for 93 per cent of the total loans disbursed by the bank, which was placed under central bank control after Lan’s arrest.

The corruption charges against Lan are part of a broader graft crackdown by the Communist party that has slowed down government approval for projects and raised questions over political stability in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. 

Vo Van Thuong resigned as Vietnam’s president in March after only a year in office because of unspecified “violations” and “shortcomings”. Thuong’s predecessor as president, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, resigned in January 2023 amid an overhaul of the government’s top ranks that also saw the departure of two deputy prime ministers.

Hundreds of high-ranking government officials have been arrested in the crackdown.

The expansion of scrutiny to the private sector has added to the uncertainty. Lan’s arrest in 2022 triggered a slowdown in the property market and corporate bond activity. The tycoon comes from one of Vietnam’s wealthiest families and was the most prominent businessperson to face graft allegations since the crackdown began.

Vietnam has been one of the top choices for international manufacturers diversifying operations away from China amid growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. The south-east Asian country has seen record flows of foreign investment, with FDI hitting an all-time high of $36.6bn last year.

However, the corruption crackdown has dented some of its appeal. Government officials are reluctant to approve licences and projects for fear of being caught up in graft investigations, resulting in what analysts have described as “bureaucratic paralysis”.

Move by Alex Gerko’s market maker bucks trend among financial firms to outsource to Big Tech

UK high-speed trader XTX Markets is building a vast data centre in Finland to handle the information for the $250bn worth of deals that it makes every day, bucking the trend among financial services groups to offload IT to Silicon Valley’s biggest technology groups.

The London-based market maker, which uses complex algorithms to buy and sell, is building a site with a 250 megawatt capacity in the Kajaani district in central Finland. The first building will manage computing power of 22.5MW, according to figures seen by the Financial Times.

The plans, which will take about two years to complete, underscore the scale and importance of processing power for XTX, which employs more than 200 people but no human traders, and makes markets in stocks, bonds, crypto and other assets.

“Modern, deep learning models require vast amounts of compute and so we have secured the Kajaani site to increase our capacity in a maximally sustainable way,” said Joshua Leahy, chief technology officer at XTX.

Space in data centres around Europe is tight, with demand far outstripping supply, according to a survey in February by real estate company CBRE. Last year European supply increased 10 per cent to 561MW, the company said.

Nordic countries are popular locations for hosting data centres, because of their cheap electricity and cold climates which means there is less need to cool servers down. Earlier this year Google said it was building a 240MW data centre in Norway.

The market maker has a supercomputer based in Iceland, according to two people familiar with the matter, while the Finnish data centre will add to its processing power.

In choosing to build its own data centre, XTX is bucking a trend among financial services companies to turn to Big Tech for help, as they try to manage the vast troves of data that power global capital markets.

Citadel Securities, a rival to XTX, has switched storing data and testing its algorithms from its own servers to Google’s cloud services, the FT reported this week, while stock exchange groups such as Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange Group are also using Big Tech companies’ cloud platforms to store and manipulate their data. 

XTX declined to comment on the size of the data centre investment.

It uses 25,000 graphics processing units to power its research, underscoring the importance of processing power for running its algorithms.

By comparison, the EU’s Leonardo supercomputer has nearly 14,000 GPUs, capable of doing 174mn bn calculations per second when it was unveiled in 2022.

GPUs process data quickly and demand for them has surged amid the artificial intelligence boom, as companies and governments clamour for the ability to train AI models.

Founded by mathematician Alex Gerko in 2015, XTX has grown to become one of the UK’s most profitable private companies, and among the world’s biggest proprietary trading firms. It made a record £1.1bn profit last year, making billionaire Gerko, who owns 75 per cent of the company, the UK’s top taxpayer. The co-chief executive paid £664.5mn in tax last year, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.

No mainstream politician seems to think cutting the military budget is the way out of a fiscal crunch.

A question for the ages will be whether German Chancellor Olaf Scholz truly understood what he was doing in February 2022 when, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, he announced that his country would transform its attitude toward defense. Yet here we are, more than two years later, with Mr. Scholz’s turning point gyrating in all sorts of interesting—and, mirabile dictu, positive—ways.

The latest example comes via yet another debate on defense spending. When Mr. Scholz proclaimed the turning point (the German word is Zeitenwende), the most important concrete action he proposed was the creation of a €100 billion special procurement fund for Germany’s military. This was the mechanism by which Germany finally would satisfy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s expectation that each member state devote at least 2% of gross domestic product to defense expenditure each year, and upgrade its military equipment to be an effective ally.

Money is how governments show they’re serious, and this special fund is demonstrating to German allies that Berlin is committing to its defense plans. Mr. Scholz secured a multiparty agreement for a constitutional amendment authorizing the off-balance-sheet fund, exempting this expenditure from Germany’s rules on government fiscal balance and thereby insulating it from guns-vs.-butter horse trading. A kaleidoscope of political alliances have seen off attempts by one party or another to fritter away the defense fund by devoting the money to climate-related, diplomatic or other ephemeral causes in the name of “national security.”

Inevitably there are a few caveats. Mr. Scholz’s administration has used the special fund in part to support military aid to Ukraine in that country’s struggle to fend off the Russian invasion that prompted the Zeitenwende. It’s a fair criticism that this cash was supposed to boost Germany’s military rather than someone else’s. But the Ukraine war constitutes the most urgent threat to European security in decades, so better that Germany contribute by any means necessary than not at all.

The bigger problem is that the special fund is running out. It was intended to last only a few years, a down payment on a permanently beefier German military. On its current trajectory, the fund likely will be exhausted in 2027, at which point the military, and military procurement, will require funding from the government’s on-balance-sheet budget.

A sign of Berlin’s newfound seriousness about defense is that politicians are fighting about this now rather than waiting until the special fund is actually gone. Germany’s political class has discovered, belatedly, that military procurement takes time. Berlin’s pre-2022 habit of trying to boost defense spending on an ad hoc basis with any cash left over at the end of the annual budget cycle precluded predictable longer-term investment. To avoid relapsing into those bad habits, politicians must think now about where the money will come from for future long-term investments.

Expect this process to be messy. Recent estimates of the size of the post-2027 budget gap range from a low of €20 billion to a high of, well, the sky’s the limit. It will depend partly on the size of the German economy, and also on whether Berlin chooses to treat NATO’s 2% target as a ceiling or a floor. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius suggests defense spending may need to rise to 3.5% of GDP.

These debates are happening while the government faces other enormous fiscal demands, not least from the net-zero energy transition the Greens in Mr. Scholz’s coalition insist on foisting on the country. The country’s highest constitutional court ruled last year that the astronomical subsidies necessary to fund this project must be paid for on-balance-sheet, a decision that already triggered one political crisis and is likely to trigger more.

Most military funding proposals so far are wholly inadequate to the scale of the challenge. Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the free-market Free Democratic Party last week suggested that some esoteric maneuvers concerning debt left over from pandemic spending programs might free up around €9 billion a year for defense, as long as social spending doesn’t increase. Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens—stuck in an unwieldy coalition with each other and Mr. Lindner’s party—predictably objected.

Mr. Pistorius, a Social Democrat, this week warned that rearranging fiscal deck chairs won’t be enough and Berlin should suspend or modify its constitutional debt limit for defense expenditures, an idea Mr. Lindner has criticized. Waiting in the wings are the center-right Christian Democrats, who may be running the government after next year’s election, and it’s hard to say what their plan would be.

Berlin has work to do. But German allies can take heart. Startlingly, no mainstream politician or party in Germany now seems to think that spending less on defense is the way to resolve this looming fiscal debate. That really is a turning point for Germany, and for Europe.

Israel is preparing for a direct attack from Iran in the next few days; Tehran yet to decide, says person briefed on the matter

TEL AVIV—Israel is preparing for a direct attack from Iran on southern or northern Israel as soon as the next 24 to 48 hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. A person briefed by the Iranian leadership, however, said that while plans to attack are being discussed, no final decision has been made.

Iran has publicly threatened to retaliate for an attack last week in Damascus, Syria, that Tehran said was an Israeli airstrike on a diplomatic building. The strike killed top Iranian military officials, including a senior member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.

Earlier this week, U.S. intelligence reports showed that an attack on Israeli assets by Iran or its proxies could be imminent, but a source says it now appears that the attack could be within Israel’s borders.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the matter said Thursday that American intelligence reports indicate an Iranian retaliatory strike within days, “possibly on Israeli soil” as opposed to Israeli interests elsewhere.

On Thursday, the American Embassy in Israel said U.S. government employees and family members would be restricted from any personal travel outside of central Israel, Jerusalem and Beersheba until further notice.

Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East, was in Israel on Thursday, defense officials said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking from an air base in southern Israel, also on Thursday, vowed to respond directly against any attack on Israel. “Whoever harms us, we will harm them. We are prepared to meet all of the security needs of the State of Israel, both defensively and offensively,” he said.

Syria also accused Israel of carrying out the attack, which killed Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who managed Iranian paramilitary operations in Syria and Lebanon, according to Iranian state media and U.S. officials. Zahedi was the highest-ranking Iranian military official to be killed since the January 2020 U.S. assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.

At least six other Iranian militants were killed in the strike, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said.

An Israeli military spokesman said that intelligence showed the building hit in Damascus wasn’t a diplomatic facility but a building that the Quds Force uses and is disguised as a civilian site.

Earlier this week, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard contacted the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with several options to strike Israeli interests, said an adviser to the paramilitary force. The scenarios under consideration include a direct attack on Israel with sophisticated medium-range missiles, he said.

In recent hours, social-media accounts close to the Revolutionary Guard have posted videos showing simulated missile attacks on Israel’s Haifa airport and its nuclear facility in Dimona. An Iranian official has also previously said Iran would strike at Israel’s power and desalination plants if attacked.

But Khamenei has yet to decide on the plans. He is concerned a direct attack could backfire with the projectiles being intercepted and Israel responding with a massive retaliation on Iran’s strategic infrastructure. “The strike plans are in front of the Supreme Leader and he is still weighing the political risk,” the adviser said.

The scenarios involve attacks by Tehran’s proxies in Syria and Iraq, for which Iran delivered drones out of warehouses in recent days, according to advisers to the IRGC and the Syrian government.

Iran and its allies could also attack the Golan—a disputed territory annexed by Israel from Syria in 1981—or even Gaza, they said, to avoid an attack within Israel’s internationally recognized territory. Another option would be to strike at Israeli Embassies, notably in the Arab world, to show them that friendly ties with Tel Aviv could be costly, these people said.

Meanwhile, the international community has been scrambling to avoid an escalation. On Thursday, Annalena Baerbock and David Cameron, respectively the foreign ministers of Germany and the U.K., both called their Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, to ask Tehran not to attack Israel, according to British and Iranian officials.

“Calls have been made by several regional and European ministers to Iran’s Foreign Minister,” a spokesman for Iran’s mission at the United Nations in New York told The Wall Street Journal.

Trafigura’s Jeremy Weir: trader-in- chief seeks to draw a line under past scandals

The 59-year-old Australian has diversified the commodities house but has had to deal with a legacy of misconduct

The year Trafigura founder Claude Dauphin picked Jeremy Weir as his successor, the commodities trading house was still paying bribes to Brazilian officials for oil contracts. A decade later the payments have come back to haunt the company: it pleaded guilty in the US in March. But Weir said this is all in the past.

“We have taken responsibility for the actions of those former employees,” Trafigura’s executive chair and chief executive said this week at the FT Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne. “To me it rules a line under this . . . and we are now moving forward.”

The corruption scandals have done little to hinder Trafigura’s ascent as a diversified commodities trading powerhouse. The Singapore-registered company is one of a handful of privately held firms that help form the backbone of the global economy, moving everything from oil and gas to metals and power around the world. Last year it traded the equivalent of the combined oil demand of the UK, France and Germany — an average of 5.5mn barrels a day. It sold more than 100mn tonnes of metals and bulk commodities, including coal. Its revenues of $244bn exceeded those of British oil major BP.

“It’s become a big beast,” said Weir, who is based in Geneva. “When I took it over . . . the business was very different,” he said. “The size of the company . . . the breadth of where it operates . . . the interaction with stakeholders around the world . . . the transparency.”

Since taking the helm, the Australian metals man has expanded into gas and power trading, carbon markets and emerging areas such as hydrogen. Trafigura’s recent contracts include a government-backed deal to supply Germany with gas, and the rehabilitation of rail links in central Africa with support from Washington. Last month it agreed to acquire UK-based Greenergy, one of Europe’s largest suppliers of biofuels.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent disruptions in commodities markets have been a boon. Net profits reached a record $7.4bn in 2023, up from $7bn a year earlier, and more than eight times what it made five years ago. While it remains one of the world’s biggest metals traders, most of its profits now come from the energy division.

The journey has been bumpy at times. Trafigura was founded in 1993 when Dauphin and four other executives broke away from Marc Rich, the trading industry godfather who was by then wanted by US authorities for tax evasion and violating Iran sanctions. Marc Rich + Co, the business they left behind, would evolve into Glencore and for years the smaller Trafigura struggled to compete.

In 2006 Dauphin spent five months in prison in Côte d’Ivoire, after a local company dumped toxic waste from a Trafigura-chartered vessel in the capital Abidjan.

Trained as a geologist and first working in the Australian mining sector, Weir traded metals derivatives at NM Rothschild. He joined Trafigura in 2001 as head of metals, just as commodity demand in China soared. Glencore listed in 2011 but Trafigura — like its other rivals Vitol, Mercuria and Gunvor — has eschewed public markets. Today it is owned by some 1,400 senior employees up from 600 in 2015.

While it remains privately held, Trafigura has adopted some of the behaviours of a publicly listed corporation. It began publishing detailed annual accounts in 2013, joined the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative in 2014 and released its first sustainability report in 2015.

Despite those efforts, Trafigura’s conduct was thrust back into the spotlight last month when it pleaded guilty in the US to paying almost $20mn of “corrupt commissions” in Brazil between 2003 and 2014.

The statement of facts, which Trafigura accepted as “true and accurate”, said its then CEO Dauphin — who was not named in the judgment but who was identifiable — had approved bribe payments. The company agreed to pay $127mn in fines and forfeited profits.

The company and its recently departed chief operating officer Mike Wainwright will also go on trial in Switzerland over alleged bribery in Angola between 2009 and 2011. Trafigura has said Wainwright rejects the charges against him.

Weir, who joined the management committee when it was set up in 2007 and became chief executive in 2014, said he had no knowledge of the Brazilian bribery scheme at the time and declined to comment on Dauphin’s involvement.

“It doesn’t reflect the company that it was then [and] it doesn’t reflect the company that it is today,” he insisted in Lausanne.

Trafigura is not alone in dealing with its past. In recent years, Glencore, Vitol and Gunvor have settled similar corruption charges with the US Department of Justice. Since then, most have stopped using intermediaries to win business — Trafigura did so in 2019. All have pledged to improve compliance.

Compliance officers are now “an integral part of the decision-making process”, Weir said. “My first question is [always] ‘Have you spoken to compliance?’ And, you know, nine and a half times out of 10, they already have.”

Jean-Francois Lambert, a former commodities banker and longtime consultant to the sector, said Trafigura had sought to move on from the “Dauphin-era”. “They have adapted the company to the new realities of the market, where society at large is requesting more transparency,” he said.

After Dauphin died in 2015, Weir ran the business alongside Wainwright and the former head of oil Jose Maria Larocca, consolidating his leadership as CEO and executive chair in 2018.

Wainwright retired in March and Larocca will exit at the end of September, leaving Weir as the longest-serving employee on the senior team.

The 59-year-old has no immediate plans to retire but said his successor would not be picked based on which trader was making the most money for the business.

“What I’ve learned a lot in the last 10 years [is that it is] very diverse, can be challenging, very lonely, because you often have to make difficult decisions,” he said.

A leading contender is former British military officer Richard Holtum, who joined from Glencore in 2014 and now runs Trafigura’s gas, power and renewables division, according to people familiar with the matter. The company declined to comment.

It is no longer enough for the Trafigura boss to be a bold trader with good connections and an eye for a deal. They needed to engage with governments and present the company to the world, Weir said. “You have to learn how to operate within that sort of system.”

Wealthy customers are pouring more money than ever into customisation pushing carmakers to invest in supply chains and dedicated teams

Ferrari’s chief executive Benedetto Vigna says he hopes one day to sell a $10bn car. He is joking, but it is an idea based on a genuine industry phenomenon: super-rich customers prepared to pay sky-high prices to create their own unique supercar. 

“This is a dream . . . but this would be the extreme of luxury,” Vigna told the Financial Times. 

Until recently, options for personalising cars such as a new Rolls-Royce, Bentley or Aston Martin were limited to choices such as paint colour and the type of upholstery and wheels. 

In the past five years, things have changed: wealthy buyers are willing to spend ever larger amounts to make their new cars highly personalised, sometimes even opting to redesign the entire vehicle themselves. 

“If you look at Bentley 20 years ago, you chose your colour, the leather and the wheels and everyone was happy,” said Adrian Hallmark, the former chief executive of Bentley who is joining Aston Martin as chief executive this year. “Now, you cannot get away with it.”

“Demand [for customisation] is through the roof, and maybe it’s because people are able to express their own aesthetic and preferences”.

This hyper-personalisation boom is a major factor in rising profitability for those brands, such as Ferrari and VW-owned Bentley, that can cater to the demands of the big spenders.

Last year, Ferrari was so profitable it increased its forecasts every quarter and posted a record €1.26bn of net profit for the year, of which about €460mn came from higher prices driven by customisation.

Bentley meanwhile has had an almost 10-fold rise in profits since 2019 to €589mn last year, driven by what the company called “jaw-dropping” levels of spending on customisation.

At Rolls-Royce, BMW’s luxury brand, a separate division has been set up to deal with personalised features. These regularly take the cost of the car — which has starting prices from £270,000 to more than £500,000 — past £1mn.

One of the most popular Rolls-Royce features is a night sky scene of tiny dimmable fibre optic lights installed in the roof of the car, allowing chauffeur-driven stargazing. But some customers want their night time view more personalised. 

One requested embroidery depicting the moon’s surface complete with craters. According to Rolls-Royce, this involved at least 250,000 individual stitches, surrounded by 1,183 fibre-optic “stars”. Another couple in Shanghai commissioned a constellation based on their baby daughter and had an image of her footprints inlaid on the car’s white dashboard. 

Bespoke commissions have reached “record levels . . . both by volume and value,” said Rolls-Royce boss Chris Brownridge. Customisation is often labour-intensive but still earns carmakers substantially higher margins.

Some customers have special requests for the outside of the car, to go with the personalised interior.

There are legendary industry stories about paint colours, from the McLaren team dispatched to a Swiss chalet to capture the exact shade of sunrise on the snow, to the engineer who returned to the Bentley factory at Crewe on the train with his nails painted the customer’s desired shade of pink. 

One of the most recent trends is carbon fibre panels and accessories. As a material, it is strong, light weight and very expensive. Used unpainted, its surface catches the light at different angles to create a shimmering effect. 

“Our clients care because it is lightweight, but it’s also beautiful,” said Vigna. 

A carbon finish, both inside and out, was seen as another way of putting your personal stamp on the vehicle, he said, adding that Ferrari had been taken by surprise last year by the popularity of this particular option.

The company had to make changes to its supply chain to cope with demand, he said, adding this would have been unthinkable five years ago. 

One Bentley buyer last year spent €400,000 replacing large sections of the bodywork with carbon fibre, spending so much that he doubled its price. 

Another asked for wood from his own forest to be used in the interior of his new Bentley, a project that eventually took the price tag above €2mn. 

At Ferrari, some customers even sit down with designers with a “base” vehicle — such as the £375,000 SF90 — and develop entirely new body shapes. One client, from a US tech company, studied aerodynamics and opted to draw his own vehicle, which Ferrari made. 

The company said it makes “a few” sports cars like this a year, where customers produce their own design based on an existing model. The price tag runs into “multiple millions”. 

One question is why people have become fixated on expensive customisation. 

Carmakers have become better at catering to such demands, investing in supply chains and dedicated teams. But there is something else at work: a number of executives say the trend is more pronounced since the pandemic. 

“Covid left a clear message — you call it a YOLO effect,” said Vigna. “In Italy we say carpe diem. You make money, you can make good investments in equity, bonds, real estate, but your lifespan is limited, so you also have fun.”