Mr. Govertsen: We're essentially the former gaming equity team at Deutsche Bank. So both Bill Lerner and myself were the gaming equity analyst team at Deutsche Bank. And then Rich Moriarty was in Institutional Sales at Deutsche Bank, more of a generalist, however he was the de facto gaming sales guy. So basically the three of us were very close for a number of years and in April pulled the plug at Deutsche and started our own shop literally three months ago. Bill and I had actually been based in Las Vegas for about three years. We were in New York for quite some time and then convinced the powers that be that it makes a lot more sense to cover the industry from the Mecca, and we set up shop three years ago in Las Vegas, and it has been a home run for us. We are the only sell-side research team here in Las Vegas. It has been great in terms of just having our feet on the ground, terrific access to management teams and others throughout the industry. Rich moved out here after we left Deutsche Bank in April. Now all three of us are 100% Las Vegas-based.
TWST: And you said you're sell-side researchers?
Mr. Govertsen: Correct. That's the beauty of what we're doing now. We were the
sell-side equity research team at Deutsche Bank, and we still are here at Union
Gaming, and that's our core business here. But we're able to dabble in other
areas that we weren't able to before, namely advisory and consulting. We've been
retained by the state of Kansas to help them with gaming expansion there and
we're talking to a couple of other states, trying to lock them in as well. We
advised MGM (MGM) on their 2.5 billion capital raise earlier this spring. On
the equity research side, we were of course constrained at Deutsche Bank to
North American equities because we had counterparts in Hong Kong, in the UK and
Australia, etc., who would cover stocks listed in those countries. Now that
we're our own shop, we're covering primarily US equities, but we're also
covering Hong Kong gaming stocks,as well as some of the private guys that have
public debt here in the US. So we are across all aspects of the capital
structure.
Tickers included in this excerpt: BYD, BYI, DB, IGT, MGM, PNK, WMS
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