Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Before we officially begin, I do want to point out to the audience that we welcome questions throughout today's presentation. Please post them in the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen and we will address those questions after the presentation. I'd now like to turn this over to Steven Saltzstein, FORCE Family Office's CEO.
Thank you, Callie, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We greatly appreciate you taking time out of your day to be with us. The one thing I just want to say about Forum Markets is they are providing a solution to illiquid assets. That has always been a need, but there's never been a solution for it. I just feel like this platform has such a potential for explosive growth. Starting with airplane engines, having this opportunity with NVIDIA and the GPU, and providing liquidity in real estate. In so many ways, this is a brilliant platform. With that said, it is my great pleasure to welcome John Kristoff of Forum. Thank you so much, John.
Thanks, Steve, and welcome everyone, and thank you to FORCE Family Office for hosting us today. We greatly appreciate the opportunity. I'm going to quickly kick things off and provide a brief company overview, including Forum's business model, our competitive moat, and importantly, the team behind the company. Our Chairman and CEO, McAndrew Rudisill, will walk you through our strategy across our four vertical markets. John Saunders, our Forum CFO, will wrap up with what will be a generally brief look at our financials. We are in our quiet period. We'll be announcing our second quarter on August 13th, and want to encourage you to join that call if you're available. Finally, we'll turn it back to Steve to run through the Q&A.
Before we jump in, just a quick reminder, we will be using forward-looking statements today, and we refer you to the more detailed risk factors that have been filed with the SEC. Forum's core thesis. Our thesis is to own and operate cash flowing assets with the option to fractionalize and tokenize those assets to broaden access and increase liquidity. We're focused on assets with high-risk adjusted yields in large scalable markets with moderate to high complexity and durable demand. Our business model is to acquire these assets, generate the yield, distribute any portion to investment partners or token holders, and then reinvest those returns to scale up the business. The most important thing to note is that our assets are intended to generate cash flow first, with tokenization second, as that market develops. Looking at our competitive moat, our advantage is really threefold.
First and foremost, we've built proprietary, scalable pipelines into high-quality asset classes that are otherwise difficult for investors to access directly, and typically come with high minimums and long lockup periods. We've built an exclusive, regulated digital infrastructure to bring more liquidity to these assets through tokenization, which McAndrew will touch on later. I think with any relatively new company, it's really important to understand the driving force behind the company. Today you have three of our leaders that you'll get to meet through this presentation. We all have some common attributes. Decades of capital markets experience with depth across compliance, finance, private credit, and fintech, and deep institutional pedigree across our board, including senior leadership experience at firms such as Lazard, Blackstone, Evercore, UBS, Credit Suisse, and more.
The key takeaway here is that this is an established team with a track record and institutional-grade execution. It's not a young startup learning as it goes. That team is executing across four primary verticals today: commercial aircraft engines, AI infrastructure, finance, and compute, modular home financing, and auto financing. Across these four verticals today, we've built a diversified, scalable business, with that, I'll turn it over to McAndrew to walk you through each of these in detail.
Thanks a lot, John. That was a great introduction. I think we should start by talking about our aircraft engine business. We are focused on generating cash flows by owning CFM56 aircraft engines. It's the most ubiquitous aircraft engine in the world. They're built by GE Aerospace and Safran, they're on all single-aisle commercial jet engines all over the world. They generate around a 15% annualized yield to Forum, we've built a proprietary pipeline on how to source these engines and who we're contracted with. Our partner on the sourcing side is Aero Engine Solutions. They're one of the largest refurbishers of CFM56 engines in the world, they have a large parts network for these aircraft all around the world with warehouses in Europe and the United States.
They're also partnered with most of the major airlines in the world, helped us generate the partnerships with our two airline partners. We are partnered with the two largest airlines in the United States. Delta and American are our lease counterparties. Most of our leases are three to five-year leases on the five engines that we currently have in our portfolio. Each of those airlines has a very deep pool of demand for additional refurbished CFM56 engines that we can continue to source through AES's refurbishment pool. We have optionality literally on a monthly basis to add two to four engines a month, they normally come in pairs, to the portfolio and then immediately put them on a long-term lease, where we're paid on a monthly basis for the utilization of the engine, a base lease rate, and for the cycle time on the engine.
It generates an incredibly steady cash flow to us. The deal that we've worked out so that we can pin the residual value of the engines is at the end of the lease term, we have an option on all these engines to sell them back to AES so that they can either part them out or we can fully refurbish them again and then put them back on lease again. It's a very stabilized model with an incredibly high TAM globally that we can just continue to scale up. All right. AI infrastructure. We have spent a lot of time on this. I'm extremely excited about it. I think it's going to become our largest vertical very soon. We've been working both on the short-term financing side, also on the ownership of the compute itself.
We are very focused on that AI compute side. Owning the compute is a very high-margin business. There is an incredible amount of demand for offtake, for the compute if you have the right types of chips. The margins are incredibly high. I always say here it's a 17%-20% annualized yield. At the current rates of compute, if you're using NVIDIA B300s, Blackwells, or Vera Rubins, we have a relationship directly with the distribution partners for these NVIDIA chips that we can acquire them and put them to work in a relatively short timeframe. As long as we get access to the power, we can put these chips to work and start immediately generating revenue and cash flow with long-term offtake agreements from some of the largest hyperscalers in the world.
This is one of our top priorities right now is to expand our AI compute business. Our focus, as Steven brought up earlier, is to deploy these NVIDIA chips into these networks. I've probably said enough. We've got a really exciting pipeline ahead of us on the AI compute side that will generate a lot of revenue and cash flow for Forum. All right. Modular home financing. We got into this business late last year, spent a lot of time studying it. As John mentioned earlier in the presentation, a lot of our board members have a lot of private credit experience. This is one of the best mortgage markets in the United States.
Berkshire Hathaway has been the 10,000-lbs gorilla in the modular home financing market through Triad for many decades. We made an investment in a company called Zippy, which we own 15% of, that had built a digital platform that was AI-based to underwrite modular home loans at both the dealer level and in the HOA level. The reason why that's important is because dealer-originated loans and HOA-originated loans are much more secure than alternate types of modular home loans. Another interesting component to the market is the LTVs are relatively low on the loans. The total quantum of dollars lent is low. It ranges between $50,000-$200,000 per loan. The default rate in this industry is, if you focus on the right channels, which we are, is extremely low.
Because of Zippy's AI underwriting engine, we've actually experienced almost a 0% default rate on all the loans that we've generated. What Zippy does is, we provide them a warehouse facility to initiate the loan to the customer at the dealer or the HOA. We then hold that loan for a moderate duration and then ultimately onsell that loan to buyers of the packaged modular mortgages, which are ultimately sold into the ABS market, or taken onto insurance company balance sheets. For doing that, we're making 9%-11% a year. We're receiving principal amortization payments, and Zippy's origination on a monthly basis has basically just continued to climb ever since we made the investments. I think when we made the investment, they were around $30 million a month of origination.
They're now trending at about $75 million a month of origination, and have signed out multiple partners that are providing them with multi-hundred million-dollar offtake agreements on the backside to purchase these loans. The Zippy equity investment's been very successful, and then we're taking very moderate risk on a moderate duration to provide them this warehouse facility to originate the loans. It's an infinitely expandable business, and the TAM is probably around $10 billion a year in the United States for modular home finance as a whole. Auto finance. This is one of the largest finance markets in the United States, and I'll point out everything that we're working on has extremely high multi-billion, if not multi-hundred billion-dollar TAMs. The aircraft engines, the AI compute is a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
We're focused on things where our offtake counterparties are very high credit quality and then have very large balance sheets. In the auto finance market, we focused on a niche and we partnered with Karus, which we made an equity investment in. Karus is a fully AI-driven car loan origination platform that's plugged into the back end of multiple origination platforms that are tied into the dealer networks in the United States. One of their largest offtake counterparties is CRIF, which has a network of over 10,000 dealers in the United States. When dealers make loans on the weekend, Friday to Tuesday, they're not paid by the bank or by the insurance company, the ultimate buyer of their loan, until later the next week. They're taking three to four days of some financing risk. They're not getting paid on that loan.
What we've set up is a warehouse facility that if you sell a car on the weekend, we'll provide you that capital upfront in partnership with Texas Capital Bank. We get paid 12%-13% annualized yield for providing this weekend liquidity to the dealers, and then we're repaid on a Tuesday. We're effectively taking no credit risk because no one defaults on their car in the first five days of ownership, and we've experienced a 0% default rate on this. We're swept out of that loan pool following the rollover on the weekend. This is another one of these facilities that we could just continue to expand and generate this kind of mid-teens yield at a very high scale because of the exposure that we have to so many dealers in the United States.
I'll have to say that Karus' AI underwriting platform is pretty unbelievable because it allows them to approve a loan in minutes with a triangulation of thousands of different variables that a dealer would never have access to with the typical way loans were originated with all the different kinds of paperwork. It's a completely digitized process that allows the database to be fully filled out, and then ultimately, if we wanted to move the loans onto blockchain, that functionality's been built into the Karus functionality as well. All right. Lastly, John touched on this in the very beginning. We made an investment in Liquidity.io. That is a licensed broker-dealer. They have a digital ATS license, and they're partnered with an algorithmic trading business called Alpaca that is backed by Citadel.
What Liquidity is building is much like Interactive Brokers or E-Trade, a trading platform where you are going to be able to trade stocks, you'll be able to trade bonds, options, and then you're going to be able to trade private equity assets through a platform they've built called VC Cross in partnership with R.F. Lafferty. Ultimately, when there's regulatory clarity in the United States, you're going to be able to privatize some of these types of assets that we have, like the loan portfolios or the engines, and fractionalize assets into digital tokens that can be traded on the exchange so that retail investors and high-net-worth individuals can purchase moderately large increments of these cash-flowing assets and then receive the cash flow and the tax characteristics of those assets on a monthly basis.
It's a platform that can be white labeled and integrated into any bank in the United States, and it provides a regulated framework that you can trade private assets on. We're excited that they've put it together with the stock and the bond trading because that'll naturally bring liquidity to the platform and then just put more eyeballs on the private assets. I'll highlight that this market's going to take a lot of time to develop. We need more regulatory clarity, I think it's directionally what a lot of Wall Street firms are very interested in going in that direction so that they can tokenize more types of products and make them more liquid and more accessible to a broader audience. I'll pass it over to John.
Hi, everybody. My name's John Saunders. I'm the CFO of Forum Markets. I'll be briefly talking about some of the strategic efforts that we've been up to this year. One of the big efforts was to de-risk the balance sheet and transition out of holding Ethereum into holding cash-flowing real-world assets. At the beginning of the year, we had a very substantial holding of ETH. We have now moved out of all of the digital assets other than a small portion that is collateral on a 3% collateralized loan. We've purchased some derivatives to hedge that position that we do not have any direct ETH exposure. We consider this to be a much more stable business that is focused on deploying capital into the verticals that McAndrew mentioned before.
These are real-world asset, cash-flow generating assets. We would like to note as well that there are very good risk-adjusted returns on these assets. McAndrew went into discussing the aircraft engines and the Tier 1 counterparties that we lease those engines to, Delta and American Airlines. Those engines are insured against any impact damage. We inspect those engines. We bore scope the fans on those engines before we accept them. They have a guaranteed residual value at the end of their life. McAndrew talked about the warehouse facility. The warehouse facility has contracted takeoff partners, and the origination bank has agreed to take any loans out of the warehouse that don't get purchased by the takeoff partners. We're holding those loans for, in most case, less than 30 days. We've never seen any defaults on those warehouse loans.
McAndrew mentioned the community recourse feature of the mobile home loans. We get a five-year recourse from the community when we issue those mobile home loans. We've worked very hard to position this into a business that does not have price volatility and that has very good risk-adjusted returns and is an operating business that is generating free cash flow. We've redeployed the capital into cash and income-reducing real-world assets. The current cash position of $62.5 million, that's as of April 30th. That has come down a bit because we've deployed. We've had two 8-Ks announcing the acquisition of two subsequent aircraft engines, now bringing our total to five engines. We've also repurchased stock at a significant discount to the NAV per share. We'll talk about that in a few minutes.
The company is focused on generating double-digit yields and operating fee revenue from platform infrastructure. That was the pre-mentioned distribution channels. We can move on to the next slide. Disciplined capital allocation driving shareholder value. We've looked to deploy capital into real-world assets and specifically into these verticals where we think are capital inefficient, where retail or even accredited investors have a difficult time accessing these verticals without being locked up for a three- to five-year hold period with a very large ticket size in some sort of private equity vehicle. We're going to continue to expand the infrastructure and partnerships. McAndrew alluded to the AI vertical that we've been working very hard to set up opportunities in.
We have some exclusivity with a couple of those partners. Also, we have partnerships that allow us to get very limited looks at these, where nobody else has the ability to acquire the engines that we do. We've worked very hard to generate those partnerships and exclusivity into those verticals. We're focused on maintaining a strong liquidity position. That starts with generating cash from our assets, managing our OpEx, and redeploying that capital as we're able to distribute those assets through our distribution channels. This supports a disciplined growth. The last part, what we make there is the share repurchase, which we can talk about on the next slide. We have repurchased a very significant amount of the company shares, over 7.1 million shares or 35% of outstanding shares in Q1 2026. This was a conscious strategic effort given the significant underpricing of the equity.
The board decided that this was the right decision to significantly reduce the shares outstanding ahead of our successful pivot into this new business. We have right-sized the repurchase authorization to $100 million and extended through Q2 2027. That gives us the flexibility to continue to repurchase. Although at current share prices, we're as much focused on developing the verticals and generating revenue, but it does give us the optionality to repurchase. This reflects confidence in our long-term growth and the price of the equity. I will also note that the board has launched a strategic alternative process. The special committee is looking at a number of opportunities that are complementary to our business to help us gain size and scale. We have looked at some opportunities within the verticals we've discussed today and some others.
We think we'll have some update on that in the coming months, but we continue to have very fruitful opportunities that are coming out of that exercise. We're focused on executing on the core strategy and scaling the platform. We've deployed capital, as mentioned, into the two aircraft engines. We have some deployment into the AI vertical coming soon. We're starting to generate more revenue from all of those verticals. Lastly, equity research. We have three firms covering the business today, Benchmark, Clear Street, and Sidoti, with a consensus price target of $10, which again reflects the confidence in the business and what we aforementioned, the equity price, which was trading at $3 or $4 earlier this year, support for our share repurchase, and we have a lot of confidence in achieving that consensus price target. I think that's all I have to say.
If anybody else has anything else, or we can move to comments.
I think we can move to the Q&A, Steve, if you want to.
Sure.
Callie, sorry.
I'm going to take that on. Let me pull that up. I would say. How much additional value is created when an asset is tokenized versus simply holding it on the balance sheet? Can you quantify the improvement in returns, liquidity, or valuation?
I'll take that. The token business model is about scale, and so if we were to tokenize a pool of $100 million worth of assets, let's say, there would be an initial fee that we could take on that tokenization, and then there would be a management fee, much like a mutual fund, for ongoing operations of that total token pool once it started trading. I would think about tokens as very much akin to the ETF or the mutual fund business model. It's just a more efficient way to directly transact an asset in an LLC structure through a Regulation D offering. The fee structures associated with that is very similar to the fee structure that you'd see at a BlackRock or a Franklin Templeton.
It's really truly a game of scale, and the optionality of tokenization, just from a business model perspective, is really about providing direct asset with positive tax attributes, like the engines have very high bonus depreciation, for example, to a wide pool of qualified, or I should say accredited investors that can invest in this. To be very clear, the token market is very nascent, and the way you make money tokenizing is tokenizing and recycling at scale. We make the most money right now by keeping these assets on our balance sheet, generating revenue and cash flow, and then redeploying that. We're set up in a position where as the token market gradually starts to grow, that we have the option to flex into it.
Great. There are dozens of companies pursuing real-world asset tokenization. What sustainable competitive advantage will allow you to become the winner rather than simply another issuer?
Well, I'll say we've got a pretty deep moat built around the verticals that we have and the relationships and the investments that we've made to make sure that those moats are very deep. I think are important because one of the things I'd highlight with other people that are trying to tokenize assets, there's only a few that have successfully been able to do it. The largest asset that's been tokenized to date are U.S. Treasuries. There's a lot of discussion about tokenizing stocks and whether that's a good or a bad thing. Stocks are already a very liquid market. The tokenization of real-world assets in a regulated framework, there are very few people that have actually done this correctly and then followed all the SEC guidelines to do it.
You have to follow the same fund management guidelines to tokenize assets, and fractionalize them and follow all the rules for selling them to the appropriate audiences. You also need to own a regulated exchange platform with an ATS level 3 to do it, and there are not many holders of this license in the U.S. because the SEC hasn't granted the license. I'd say people are talking a lot about it, but no one's really actually legally doing it in the United States at scale yet. I think where this actually evolves is the banks are going to get involved, the mutual fund companies are going to get involved.
What we've seen is they're interested in partnering with people like us that have access to these giant pools of assets that you can funnel into the system, similar to the way ABS market package loans today.
Yeah. I would
Oh, go ahead, please.
That dovetailed with what McAndrew said. Having the quality verticals and assets that have an investment profile that are very attractive to the buyers of the token, and then having the very well-regulated, the guardrails on the well-regulated offering, which will go through the exchange Liquidity.io. Doing it in a robust, safe, well-regulated manner, and then providing assets that have the right investment profile that the token buyers, the demand that's there today, is looking to get.
Thank you. What regulatory developments would most accelerate your business? What regulations represent the biggest risk to the strategy?
I'd say the CLARITY Act, number one. We need some movement on that next year. You can look at the probability of the odds on Kalshi or Polymarket about what's going to happen with that. I think that's number one. You need a really clear set of rules around tokenization. I can't emphasize enough that our business today is completely focused on just generating revenue from the verticals that we're in. If we never tokenize an asset at all, our cashflow would just continue to grow from executing on the plan that we're rolling out, particularly with the focus that we have on the AI compute side.
You had mentioned you're pursuing opportunities ranging from AI compute, finance, to aircraft engines and consumer credit. What characteristics make an asset attractive to Forum, and what opportunities do you intentionally avoid?
Okay. Number one characteristic, global TAM, large counterparties for offtake of revenue, and high credit quality. I'd say number three, we spend a lot of time looking at the downside risk associated with the investments that we're going to make relative to the return that we can generate. Everything has the same characteristic. They all have long-term contract, offtake counterparties. There's a lot of underwriting that goes on about the credit quality of the offtake partners. I'll use AI as an example. You've got an incredibly large supply-demand imbalance in the compute market, and it provides you an opportunity to interface with all different kind of size purchasers of the compute on the offtake. There's a real shortage on the power side, too. We're very good at arbitraging those types of opportunities.
Things that we're avoiding, we're avoiding things that have a lot of revenue volatility. We're avoiding things that are more niche-y in terms of market size. We're avoiding really anything that requires a high degree of leverage, and you can see our balance sheet has virtually no debt on it. Those are kind of the three things that we stay away from.
Thank you. What are some of the milestones that investors should expect over the next 12 months that would have the greatest impact on revenue and shareholder value?
I think number one, we're focused on developing our AI compute business, that has a lot of revenue upside for us. I'd say that's number one. Number two, the process that the special committee is going through, John mentioned, it's been going very well. I think that dovetails with what we're doing on the AI compute side, we've looked at a lot of really interesting opportunities, we're looking at pushing that to get some transactions done here by the end of the year. Those are probably the number one and two things that are going to generate a lot of equity value for the company over the coming months.
I would just add to that, we expect to be cashflow positive in the next 12 months, that as we add incremental investments, that's driving up revenue. We've been able to close a few contracts, reduce our costs. We're actively working on that. As we continue to unlock some of these verticals that we think that will be cashflow positive, that's certainly a milestone we're all working very carefully to manage the business towards.
We've continued to buy back the stock, too, in the open market. When there's opportunities and the stock is weak, then we've bought back over 30% of the equity. We've kept buying it back if we think the valuation doesn't match to what we see on the value of the assets and the cashflow.
That's actually one of the questions. It seems very undervalued. What catalyst will get it back up?
Well, I think the buybacks help, number one. Two, when you see the revenue start to change from the deployment of the aircraft engines plus what we're working on the AI compute side. There's a pretty big change in revenue, and that all flows through to cash flow, and ultimately that's going to impact the equity value. When you start changing revenue at a large percentage rate, market will pick up on it.
Then, can you talk a little bit more about the modular homes sector? How fast is that growing, and what's your interest in that vertical?
Well, in aggregate, the industry is not growing at a very high pace. Let's call it a low single-digit growth. We, as a percentage of the total industry, are less than 10% of the industry right now. Our ability to expand Zippy into more of the market is huge. It's a $10 billion a year market, and we're doing $75 million a month of mortgage origination. We've got lots of states that Zippy is not licensed in today that they could be. That's got years of growth ahead of it.
Can you expand on the tax depreciation?
Yes. All right. John, you can take that.
I can take that. These are capital assets that are eligible for bonus depreciation. One of the things that we've discussed is a fund structure, tokenization structure, where you can distribute through a K-1 those tax attributes in the first year of the holding. We haven't taken out any debt on these aircraft engines either. That's something that we know at some point we could do to drive returns even higher. As McAndrew alluded to, we've been very conservative. Essentially, that's just the bonus depreciation that could pass out on a K-1 to a holder of the token or a fund SPV.
If you have operating income, you can get a very high percentage offset to the bonus depreciation, which massively improves your returns on the engines. The chips have a, I believe it's either a four or five-year term of life depreciation flow-through on the chip investments for the compute.
Great. That concludes the questions. If anyone has additional questions, you can always reach out to me. I can put you in touch with the team here. They in turn will have all of your information and will be reaching out. I do want to turn it back over to you, John, John, and McAndrew, for any final words before we close out.
Go ahead, Mac.
I want to thank everyone for taking the time to listen to this presentation. We're happy to take questions from you all one-on-one if you'd like to reach out to us.
Absolutely. I can be reached at ir@forum-markets.com. Super easy to get a hold of. Thank you, Steve, thank you, Callie, for hosting us. We really appreciate the opportunity, and look forward to engaging with you one-on-one going forward.
Great. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day.
Thank you.