Earnings Call Transcript - GROW Q1 2024

Holly Schoenfeldt, Director of Marketing

In Slide #2, the presenters for today's program are Frank Holmes, U.S. Global Investors CEO and Chief Investment Officer; Lisa Callicotte, Chief Financial Officer; and myself, Holly Schoenfeldt, Director of Marketing. Now let's move to Slide #3. This is forward-looking statements. So during this webcast, we may make forward-looking statements about our relative business outlook. Any forward-looking statements and all other statements made during this webcast that don't pertain to historical facts are subject to risks and uncertainties that may materially affect actual results. Please refer to our press release and the corresponding Form 10-Q filing for more detail on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any described today in forward-looking statements. Any such statements are made as of today, and U.S. Global accepts no obligation to update them in the future. On the next slide, as always, we would love to offer anyone tuned in today one of our JETS, GOAU, or SEA hats. In addition, we do have JETS luggage tags available. All you have to do is send us an email with your physical mailing address to info@usfunds.com.

Frank Holmes, CEO and Chief Investment Officer

Thank you, Holly, and thank you, all the shareholders and Lisa, who are helping the marketing team put this presentation together. And yes, the DNA volatility is very important because they try to identify that and relate that every asset class has its own unique volatility and often, it's more volatile the more emergent or a new business is coming into the forefront. And if it's not in one of the big indexes, Tesla, as you can see here, used to have a daily volatility of 6%. It's now 3% because it's gone into the S&P 500. And that's what happens over time. And so anyone that goes and buys GROW has to expect it's a nonevent for 70% of the time to go up or down 2% in a day and over a 10-day period to go plus or minus 5%. That's very common with microcap stocks and it's very common with GROW. I am going to walk through the presentation to try to help you embrace and understand what drives the direction often for GROW stock price. Next, please. I want to thank all the fun investment advisers. Most of these investment advisers are index, except for Perritt. That is an active microcap fund manager, and I believe that the same thing with Canon Wealth. And thank you for being shareholders. Next, please. I own approximately 18% of the company, and I have 99% of the voting control, which is to be in compliance with the 40 Act rules for an investment adviser. Going into great detail on the complexity of it, but basically, all the covenants everything is aligned with all shareholders. Next, please. The company has been paying a monthly dividend since 2007. The current yield on the share price of $2.69 is $3.35 and the Board on a regular basis reviews to approve the dividend. Next, please. Our vision is to create thematic products that are sustainable. That's always proved to be difficult. I don't know why, but knowing for gold, GO GOLD for these big cycles, and the last big gold cycle from 2001 to 2007, our assets went from basically $500 million up to $7 billion, and it's interesting to see that those assets like Eastern Europe, which were very early went from $4 million to over $1 billion. And the same thing at the China fund from the early 90s it exploded in assets. But the whole anti-Eastern Europe and concern over Russia has basically really created a difficulty for investors to want to take that risk. I think a lot of American investors would rather take the risk in a domestic technology stock than to go and be in Eastern Europe or anything that's in China. So those 2 funds, which were once big product funds and very profitable have been shut down. It has nothing to do with the overall fund performance. It is a combination of mutual funds being no longer the appealing asset class. It's been directed towards ETFs, where the growth is and I'm going to walk through with the specialties in the ETF space, where we see the growth maintaining. Managing expectations for a new product launch is crucial. We estimate that the basic annual costs for audits and legal expenses are around $250,000, not including compliance, marketing, and trading. Putting a product on the shelf requires approximately 40 years of planning to build the brand to reach critical mass. To cover the basic shelf costs, you need about $50 million at 60 basis points. To cover all expenses, an estimate of around $100 million is necessary. We understand this and are prepared to support and back our product launches. I mentioned earlier that we shut down our Eastern European fund and our China region fund. From that experience, we learned that cargo shipping, particularly, captures about 80% of commodity flows from emerging countries to manufacturing centers, with the finished products then shipped back to developed countries. You can observe growth in emerging markets through shipping and cargo airlines without needing to invest in a thematic Japanese fund or going directly to China. Any products sent from Japan to America will be transported by ship or plane. This has been our focus and strategy in replacing those funds with our Sea to Sky ETF. Strategically, we continue to buy back the stock and I'll talk more in detail in a few minutes and then manage to preserve our cash for future growth opportunities and market corrections and M&A activity to grow our fund assets. We're always looking at opportunities for growth. Next, please. So why buy back shares? The company believes that the stock is undervalued, deeply undervalued and therefore, buys back shares of GROW when the price is flat or down from the previous day's trading. We have a disciplined, orderly fashion of buying back stock. The lower it goes, the more we buy back. And that's just how simple it is in that model. Warren Buffett highlights the value proposition of buying back one's own stock and as a value-accretive prices. So doing so, Buffett says benefits all shareholders, not just the biggest holders and we agree. Next, please. So the S&P 500 Goldman Sachs says the U.S. stock buybacks could jump to an all-time high to $1.1 trillion, even with the tax that was imposed by the Biden administration and interesting enough, the huge purchase this past week by Apple, which ignited the technology stocks from the billions of dollars a month, they throw up on free cash flow. I think it's just prudent in our strategy what we're doing. Next, please. The current share repurchase program for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, the company repurchased a total of 211,282 Class A shares using approximately $577,000. Next, please. So this is sort of a value. I don't know what happened with the numbers not being included in this visual. We'll get them corrected, but the focus used to be on 15 million Class A shares. Over time, it is slowly contracting, and the Class A shares outstanding is now 11.8 million, while the shareholder float is approximately 11.2 million. Next, please. So the concept of having a dividend and buying back stock maybe in favor created an ETF. They became quite successful on focusing on those companies that had 3 things: pay down their debt, free cash flow to increase the dividend or buy back the stock. Those stocks outperform the S&P 500. And so we do find it's a very balanced way of how we're looking at the capital structure of capital markets and how we're positioned in capital markets. Next, please. So the shareholder yield formula is cash dividends, net repurchase and net debt reduction divided by market cap. Next, please. So gross total shareholder yield is approximately 8.32%. Now this is relevant when you compare it to the next visual, which is the 5-year government bond. So often in dividend growth monitor models, it's risk-free to go buy a 5-year government bond today and get a 4.21% yield and so why would someone buy GROW and get the yield of total shareholders 8.32%, and that's because of the volatility and what the risk is. So risk-free is 4.21%, anything above that is the premium. So quite often, the premium is only about 50%. So it appears to be that GROW is undervalued on this model. But the microcaps as a whole have seen net redemptions out of the funds. Many of the active funds in the small-cap microcap have found it difficult and fund flows and in particular, when the rules changed 3 years ago come June on what's deemed as being illiquid stock position that used to only be for bonds and it's morphed over in the regulatory world to include equities, and that has had a negative impact because trustees and these boards are always reluctant to have to determine what is illiquid and so why even own them. So you've seen a bias towards even in the gold space, which we have tremendous expertise in that they'll buy a stock because of liquidity, not because it pays a higher yield or it offers better value and not sort of morphing up a regulatory world. But longer term, it's always been proven on data analysis when you go back 20 and 30 years, the total shareholder yield is a great discipline if you're a long-term investor to look at picking companies. Next, please. As a fund manager, you would analyze the impact of rising yields on microcap stocks. In 2023, the 5-year government bond yield increased from 3.5% to nearly 5%, which led to a sell-off in microcap stocks, particularly between August and October. After the 50-day moving average for these yields dropped, microcap stocks began to rise again. This demonstrates the trade-off in investment strategy. Each month, insurance companies and other asset allocators receive fund flows and invest in a risk-free manner, favoring the 5-year government bonds initially before shifting to stocks. This pattern of rotation is evident. Since April, we've noticed that yields have started to rise again while microcap stocks have begun to sell off. It's important to understand that as a microcap stock, whether you're a shareholder or an active fund manager, these factors can influence price movement and stock direction over any quarter or any 12-month rolling period. However, the more crucial aspect is the growth in revenue, which is strongly linked to the growth in assets. Next, please. And this is another sort of visual of taking a look at it at a different time period. This is the microcap index, the Russell Microcap Index versus the big cap S&P 500 versus GROW stock. So you can see the S&P is far outperformed, the magnificent 7 big tech stocks have far outperformed the S&P 500 the Russell Microcap Index is up 20% and GROW's up 11% when you take a look over a 12-month period. Next, please. When we examine the past three years, it becomes clear that GROW has significantly underperformed. I have some dedicated shareholders who often inquire about our actions, new products, asset management, and capital structure. Some of these inquiries are quite useful, providing valuable insight. In particular, Bruce Newberg, a thoughtful and long-term shareholder, has been both involved with and distanced from the company over time. In comparing our performance to the Russell Microcap, we see a consistent underperformance, which is also evident when compared to the S&P, which has increased by 38%. There is a notable difference between the performance of the Russell Microcap and the large-cap liquid stocks. This raises the question of why GROW has lagged behind. Next, please. Well, our understanding is that when we go and look at the Russell Microcap, and we look at GROW over a 5-year period, where we had a spectacular run, where we ran up to $12. And you can see here, this is what 191% price action since over the 5-year period, and we've outperformed the S&P 500, and we've outperformed the Russell Microcap, which is really hard to believe but if you had bought it 5 years ago, you're still doing better owning GROW as you've been able to maintain and have you been able to shortly get out at the very top, and you're a very good trader of trading the position. I myself have not been a trader out of the position as I continue to try to build wealth underneath the hood of the company. Next, please. Now this is more granular and this is trying to explain to you as an investor, what often drives the stock movement. And we can see when the stock had its big run and peak a high technology, which we were owning close to $1 for every share, a share in HIVE. It had the spectacular move HIVE did. And this also had a big impact on the movement of GROW because of mark-to-market. And we also had this huge asset growth during COVID where HIVE went from HIVE but jets ETF went from $40 million up to in September about $4 billion in assets. So we had this incredible run where JETS was growing, HIVE was exploding, Bitcoin was exploding, and that moved our stock. That's our stock seems to move on the anticipation of big growth in revenue. It also corrects. So one of them would say, okay, well, let's look at those 5 years, why are you down from that peak whereas JETS is not down as much. Well, JETS has had redemptions during that period. Predominantly international investors that put over $1.5 billion into the ETF have seemed to redeem. We had a lot of money out of Israel from Israeli insurance companies. And as we all know, the challenge that Israel has been going through, but they started to redeem before the war in Gaza and sort of how they were looking at the risk of a recession. And we've now been living with over 500 days, the longest time period of inverted yield curve. And historically, with an inverted yield curve, microcap stocks are challenged. I think that this is another factor. And the concern of the yield curve is a big recession, and therefore, the airlines will take it on the chin. But in fact, the redemptions have been there, but the airlines continue to make buckets of money. They continue to squeeze out any type of competition they have, and Lisa is going to walk you through in a few minutes. There's no discounts in booking in a year out from now like there would be in a normal fears of a recessionary year you would see in a forward curve that there'll be a big dip in pricing of buying tickets. That's not taking place. The airlines are still significantly undervalued from a growth at a reasonable price perspective and have greater potential for growth compared to other sectors in transportation. The supply of pilots and available routes remains very constrained, giving airlines considerable pricing power. We converted HIVE into a convertible debenture during a peak period when it performed well, which has helped us build cash on our balance sheet. However, the day-to-day value of U.S. Global and the quarterly mark-to-market assessments have significantly changed due to the structure of the note. Next, please. So when we look at our competitors, WisdomTree is 100% ETFs, Invesco is 40% of their assets like QQQ, and they also have mutual funds and private assets, etc., and U.S. Global is about 86% of our operating revenue comes from ETFs. So we're not 100%. And so I think it's on a relative basis, important to compare. You can see from price to book U.S. Global is inexpensive. WisdomTree trades at the highest price to book. QQQ trades at lower value, but I think that we are probably lower than QQQ because of the intrinsic value of the real estate. I receive calls from shareholders suggesting that we sell our real estate, lease it back, and buy back stock, which they view as a quick solution. However, maintaining our current building and space, along with the potential for growth, remains more cost-effective than leasing a comparable amount of space elsewhere. I've been monitoring this closely as a capital allocation manager. Thus far, it has proven to be a more attractive option. Our property may not be a towering skyscraper or located in downtown Toronto or L.A., where REIT values have plummeted by 85%, but it has a unique real estate profile that hasn't been impacted by the issues facing larger buildings post-COVID. I continue to view it as an undervalued asset. We are in the process of acquiring 2.5 acres along the interstate highway system in San Antonio, which represents a significant piece of land connecting various major cities from Jacksonville to L.A. I believe this land will serve as an excellent long-term investment. In terms of price to cash flow, we appear to be more expensive compared to WisdomTree and Invesco. Our dividend yield is attractive, though Invesco's is higher; however, when considering total yield and pre-tax margins, we offer better value than Invesco. WisdomTree's assets, pre-tax margins have improved and the return on their assets have improved, but we are still sort of interesting enough in the middle tier, as you can see here, is not being deeply undervalued and not overvalued relative to the other groups. Thank you. Next, please. But I would assure you that I believe that we're deeply undervalued. And that's why on a steady basis, we continue to buy back our stock. I look at the fiscal year 2024. The company remains profitable despite challenging macro market conditions. The company continues the buyback stock. The company has a strong balance sheet, including cash and other investments. However, for the past quarter, from December to March, we experienced minimal growth. Lisa will provide more details. From an operational perspective, we incurred losses, primarily due to the acquisition of assets in Europe and our efforts to expand the application of our quantamental model in London. We are very excited about transitioning JETS into TRIP and broadening the TRIP model to encompass not just airlines but also shipping, including cruise lines, which have been high performers in the IBD investor business daily universe. These stocks have performed exceptionally well over the past couple of years and will now be incorporated into the TRIP model. And so we're excited that we've got that fund up to critical mass and hopefully to turn profitable here in the next 6 months. Next, please. So we have about $1.8 billion in assets, our quarter revenue is about $2.6 billion. I think we need about $2.2 billion to really feel safe and comfortable that we're covering the growth, not just the cost of putting products on the shelf, but just the overall complex that's requiring the compliance costs and marketing costs and trading costs that are all necessary to have a product on the shelf. Next, please. So earnings per share, as you see it made $0.09, was flat the last quarter. Next, please. So we're very excited about an April 24 expansion of global investment opportunities with the TRIP ETF listed on the London Stock Exchange. The merger increased our assets by 300%, provide the critical mass to expedite growth. It's our innovative approach using smart beta 2.0 investing, which really comes from a quantamental approach to investing and I mentioned earlier that we expanded the cruise lines in the diversity of the product. Next, please. Looking at a broader perspective, rather than focusing only on GROW, we are examining our positioning within the landscape. North America and Europe are actively launching thematic ETFs, and we have always been a thematic company. Initially recognized for gold, we continue to focus on it as a thematic investment. This clearly illustrates that the growth in thematic ETFs is still strong. Next, please. The flows remain strong and robust. Next, please. So quantamental investment strategy combines cutting-edge technology with robust data analysis to help optimize returns and manage risk effectively for the shareholders. You can go to Investopedia and give you another more broader, deeper description of what it means. But smart beta 2.0, we were pioneers there, and I'm a big believer in our mosaic from being global investors that are applying a data map, discipline from macro trends or purchasing manufacturers index of looking at trend analysis and the correlation with commodities that all lend itself to creating the smart beta 2.0 ETFs. Now we have shipping. We have airlines, jets, and we have TRIP in London. Next, please. Well, some positive things for gold. Gold has been on a tear this quarter. It slowed down recently because rates start to rise in the past since April, as we showed earlier in the presentation, but gold in Japanese yen terms is up, as you can see here, 26% and Chinese yuan is up 17% and rupee, it's up 16%. This is a secular bull market in gold. So gold is rising in all-time highs for most countries, currencies worldwide. Next, please. What we are observing is that there are some logical reasons for the notion that bad news is good news for gold. The interest expense on U.S. public debt has reached $1 trillion. Moving on, global air travel demand increased by 13%, while it just went up by 10%. I believe it remains significantly undervalued; if it were to be evaluated relative to other transportation sectors, we could see its EBITDA performance double or even triple. Next, please. Airline industry expected to start with record summer travel in 2024. I mean I'm getting you a sticker shock of planning summer vacations going over to Europe and going down to Africa that there's just no slowdown in the cost of these prices of tickets from a year ago of what's taking place. Next, please. So GROW's investment in HIVE's digital technology, it was a $15 million convertible. They've been paying down each quarter. And as you can see here that it's $5.1 million is owed at least can give any additional granularity as necessary. Next please. Now I'm going to turn over to hardworking Lisa Callicotte, our CFO.

Lisa Callicotte, CFO

Thank you, Frank. Good morning. First, I'll start with our highlights. Our average assets under management are $1.8 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2024. Operating revenues were $2.6 million, and we had a slight quarter net loss, but it rounded to $0.00 per share. On the next slide, we talk about our breakout of earnings. We have operational earnings that consist of our advisory services, and we have other earnings, which mainly consists of realized and unrealized gains on our investments but both our advisory earnings and our investment gains and losses fluctuate based on stock market forces. The next few slides give some more detail of our operations for the quarter ending March 31, 2024. On this slide, you can see our operating revenues are $2.6 million for the quarter. It's a decrease of $1 million or 28% from the $3.6 million in the same quarter last year. And the decrease is primarily due to decreases in assets under management, especially in our jets ETF. Operating expenses for the current quarter were $3 million. This is an increase of $187,000 or 6% primarily due to an increase in general and administrative expenses of $256,000 or 17%, primarily due to high fund expenses as discussed by Frank because these related to proxy costs for the elimination of our equity mutual fund performance fees and our merger costs related to our European UCITS. But both of these initiatives are investments in future revenue. Removal of the performance fees will cause less volatility in our mutual fund advisory fees, and the fees will be more consistent with other mutual funds. And our European UCITS merger increased our assets approximately $18 million, which is over 300%, and our fee increased from 65 bps to 69 bps. The G&A expense increase was somewhat offset by a decrease in employee compensation and benefits of $55,000. On the next slide, you can see our operating loss for the quarter was $488,000 or an unfavorable change of $1.2 million compared to the same period for 2023. Other income decreased $688,000 compared to prior year, mainly due to net realized and unrealized losses on equity securities of $231,000 in the current period compared to realized and unrealized gains in equity securities of $270,000 in the same quarter in prior year. So this is an unfavorable change about $0.5 million. And there was also a decrease in realized gains on debt securities of $127,000 compared to prior year. So there is a decrease from prior year. We still had positive net other income for the quarter. Net loss after taxes for the quarter is $35,000 or $0.00 per share. On the next slide, we see that we still have a strong balance sheet. It includes high levels of cash and securities. The following slide is some more information about assets. And then we can see on the next slide that we still have no long-term debt. And the next slide helps see that we have a network capital of $38.6 million, which increased from $1.2 million or 3% since June 2023, and we have a current ratio of 17.5 to 1. Now I'd like to turn it over to Holly to discuss marketing and distribution.

Holly Schoenfeldt, Director of Marketing

Thank you, Lisa. All right. On the first slide in my section, I just want to briefly point out some of the upcoming events that U.S. Global will be attending or speaking at. So the first is the Wealth Management Edge conference. It's an ETF-focused event happening in Florida just next week actually. So our Head Trader, our business consultant and myself will all be in attendance, and we would love to meet you there. If you'll be attending. We also have some free adviser passes that we can give out. So if you want one of those, just email me at info@usfunds.com. The other event listed here in June is one that both Frank and Ralph Aldis will be in attendance. It's the mining investment event of the North happening in Quebec City. This is a premier conference focused on the gold space and Frank will be giving a keynote there and also moderating a panel. In addition, both Frank and Ralph will be doing one-on-one meetings with various companies, many of which we hold in our funds. So on the next slide, I want to quickly point out that our website traffic during the quarter ended March 31 was over 0.5 million visitors from around the world to usfunds.com. Many were repeat visitors, but there were even more new visitors, many of which came to read the award-winning Frank Talk blog or sign up for the Investor Alert newsletter, which we continue to see growth in both. Now on the next slide. Don't forget that our educational content does not only come in the form of the Frank Talk blog or the Investor Alert newsletter. We love educating our shareholders through video content as well. So make sure that you're subscribed to our YouTube channel to get video updates on everything from gold to airlines and luxury goods. Lastly, on the next slide, as we wrap up today's presentation, I want to remind everyone that we share a majority of our new content as well as any announcements about upcoming events across all of our social media platforms, which also continue to grow. So I encourage you all to follow us on these platforms if you're not already, just so you're up to date with what's going on with GROW, our funds and just broader market insights. And then this concludes today's presentation, and I just want to say as a reminder to our audience, if you have any questions, you can email those into info@usfunds.com, and we will gladly follow up with you to get anything clarified. Thanks so much for tuning.