Owning equities is an essential part of anyone's portfolio. You just can't ignore it over time. It's going to add the real pop to anyone's overall performance.

Underwriting is probably the smallest part of our business.

We're certainly interested in maximizing our return and doing it - we're interested in maximizing our return, but we're also interested in doing it over a long period of time and in doing it in a way that never endangers the firm from a survivability standpoint.

It's difficult to make your clients understand that there are certain days that the market will go up or down 2%, and it's basically driven by algorithms talking to algorithms. There's no real rhyme or reason for that. So it's difficult. We just try to preach long-term investing and staying the course.

We don't think of ourselves as a regional investment bank. We think of ourselves as merchant bankers with clients all over the country.

In our experience, what we have found is the rare commodity is a good management team. And good management teams manage through good and bad cycles and manage to grow their business over a long period of time.