our guest host is scott sperling, copresident of thl partners. used to hand for thomas h. w york tom greenhouse. cnbc contributor. i want to start with you, scott. i wouldn't necessarily expect you to be a market timer or individual stock picker. but doing what you do you need to have a valuation of the equity markets to decide on your strategy for what you do. fairly valued, overvalued, undervalued? >> i think at this point it's somewhere in the fairly valued range. i wouldn't say that it's dramatically undervalued. as we look at what's happened over the course of the last really 18 months what we've seen is a series of cycles in the credit markets that have been moving towards relatively robust situations. that tends to affect what we do almost more than the equity market valuation. so we tend to focus on that a little bit more. on the other hand, the equity markets, as we say, looking at individual companies you can see a wide variation in the underlying value, and where those market values are relative to our assessment of the intrinsic value of that -- >> but overall t