Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Andrew Kligerman with UBS.
Andrew Kligerman – UBS
I have a few questions, Jessica you made the comment that you were exploring share buy back, could you elaborate on what you meant by that term?
Jessica Bibliowicz
I think you probably saw in our press release we do now have the authorization to repurchase stock so we have the ability to do buy backs and we won’t specify, we don’t intend to specify the timing of any purchases in advance but that authorization is in place.
Andrew Kligerman – UBS
Do you have an appetite to buy back stock and if so, what could you do? I know what you can do but?
Jessica Bibliowicz
We said the authorization was based?
Andrew Kligerman – UBS
But what’s the appetite, do you want to get really active?
Jessica Bibliowicz
At this point with the low stock price we think it’s very appropriate for us to look at the possibility of doing a share buy back. We’ll always balance that with the acquisitions and their long term impact to the company. We think we can handle the balance of it.
Andrew Kligerman – UBS
Handle the balance of it, so that means you might do more than look but I won’t pursue any more. With regard to the 19% gross in Highland and NFP/ISI and then finishing out the quarter with a 7.6% same store growth rate, there was clearly a big short fall in some of your other firms. Could you give us color around some of the firms that sell dramatically short and why?
Jessica Bibliowicz
Yes, we definitely studied it and the impact happened at the retail life firms in general. There was no extensive pattern that we could find. Typically when we see a pattern, a change in the market or capacity or just a change in consumer behavior we will signal that. Frankly for the firms that fell short of expectations we had other firms that were very fluent and met our expectations. It really did happen in the retail life side and as you know that is sometimes very difficult to predict whether cases will actually close. There were some of our firms that typically can be strong retail life in the fourth quarter that were just slower than we expected.
Andrew Kligerman – UBS
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