National Holdings Corporation (NHLD)

[glass99]

This person asked insightful questions.

Final Question:

You mentioned going forward you were looking at different strategies and growth strategies. Can you elaborate just a little bit on that?

Robert Fagenson - Executive Chairman and CEO

Well, obviously we find that the banking is a higher margin business, so we are primarily a retail shop moving into banking. So, one, we'd like to do more banking, and we agreed to do all that in our institutional business. So we've hired four analysts the last 18 months and we hope that that will position us to build our institutional business which bode well with our investment banking, which will enable us to do more deals at higher margins.

We have a lot of relationships, corporate relationships, with public companies. The ability to attract advisory business is something that is very, very attractively incremental to our revenue stream and also very high margin. Goldie has felt that by building out with our investment banking department, additional analytic capability to be able to serve those clients going forward will be a significant area of growth. And already we're seeing that that is working in our favor.

As we look out in the marketplace, and Goldie is out on a mission doing this as we speak, there are opportunities out there. The market in our industry is creating -- has created a lot of dislocation, and dislocation creates the type of opportunities -- the type of opportunities that our recruiting team loves. So we're out in the marketplace looking for individuals, branch offices, divisions of companies, and entire brokerage units just like Gilman, that's an add to our, excuse me, expanding strategy of growing the business and then using a cross-pollination of our investment banking to be able and increase the business and up the margins of these companies.

So I mean, when I say we're looking at strategies, it's not like we're thinking of going out and buying car dealerships. We're thinking within our industry and the opportunities that had been created, particularly in the last six months that we believe will exist in the next year as well, to be able to extend our abilities out into different areas. Plus the addition of Gilman and the high-margin tax preparation business is something that we think we can effectively extend to great areas within our business. So we see no shortage of opportunities.

Unverified Participant

Excellent. Thank you very much. And congratulations on a great quarter.

Robert Fagenson - Executive Chairman and CEO

Thank you. Thank you for testing us with some good questions.



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