Eric Colson
Analyst · William Blair. Please go ahead
Thank you Makela. And thank you to everyone for joining the call. At Artisan we value time, so we appreciate everybody taking the time to listen to the call or read the transcript. Our goal on these calls are to describe who we are and how recent events relate to our long-term vision. Consistency, stability and predictability are essential on a people business. Moving to slide two, with all of the headlines and noise about industry disruption, this summer provided to be a great time to bring together Artisan’s investment team leaders and more than a hundred current and perspective clients, consultants and intermediary partners for an investment forum. The forum highlighted the passion that Artisan portfolio mangers have for investing, as well as the economy and independence of the investment team. Listening to each team presents, you could easily appreciate the importance of talent and economy to our model. You could also appreciate how the investment team use to greed [ph] the freedom, especially the flexibility to invest in companies throughout the world to generate returns and manage risk. The investment forum provided a really nice perspective on what matters. Through our institutional clients, intermediary partners, our funds and other collective vehicles there are thousands of real people trust enough the compound well and manage risk, getting the investments right for those people is what matters most. Slide three summarizes Artisan's recent and long-term investment performance. We haven't said much about the active passive performance debate for the ETF phenomenon, because our results speak for themselves. Our business model has produced multiple investment teams over various time periods with different investment approaches that deepen their benchmark passive indexes, net of fees. Over 20 years, we've established nine investment teams and offered 17 investment strategies to client. Over the years, we merged our small-cap growth team in today's growth team and we have shut down two investment strategies. Today, we have 8 teams managing 15 strategies. We believe that our emphasis on quality over quantity increases the probability of investments in business success. Long-term absolute and relative returns fair that out. After fees 10 of the 13 strategies listed have beaten the index by 156 basis points or more per year since inception with investment dates ranging from 1996 to 2015. Eight of the 10 outperforming strategies have since inception track records of 10 years or more. We expect each strategy to add value for our clients over time to obtain us to see that three negative since inception value-added numbers, we expect better. However, we understand and can explain those returns and are confident that over time and through full market cycles the value equity, US small-cap growth in emerging market strategies will add value for clients and investors. As all three strategies have done in recent periods. We don't usually highlight short-term investment results. Our year-to-date investment returns have driven AUM and financial results. At quarter end the non-US growth and global equity strategies had each generated more than 400 basis points of outperformance during 2017, net of fees and each of the growth team three strategies had generated more than 700 basis points of outperformance net of fees. To generate high value-added returns, we continue to add investment degrees of freedom. The data on slide four help explain why. Since 1996, there is been a steady and significant decline in the number of publicly traded companies in the United States. The surviving US publicly traded companies tend to be bigger and older than in the past. Whatever the reason for the so-called listing gap, the consequence is a smaller opportunity set in US equities, in particular, fewer small-cap and mid-cap companies. At the same time, the number of exchange traded funds have increased, some ETF provided exposure the broad market cap weighted indexes, like the S&P 500 that many ETF provide exposure to market segments for style factors for which investors previously used and actively managed product. We understand the trend towards ETF and other indexed products and we are evolving accordingly, launching our own exposure oriented strategies would conflict with our high value-added model. We have no expertise or competitive advantage with indexed products. Instead, we have focused on continuing to provide our investment teams with more degrees of freedom to differentiate returns and manage risk. We have several recent examples to report. In April we launched the Artisan Thematic strategy, which it idiosyncratic and concentrated. There's no ETF or index products out there that can re-create or mimic what Chris Smith and the Thematic team are doing. The strategy is off to a solid start and we expect to launch an additional strategy for the Thematic team in the relatively near future. In June, we launched the second strategy for our credit team, which I will discuss in more detail in a minute. Lastly, we're in the process of launching a new strategy for growth team, the Artisan Global Discovery strategy. The growth team has had great success managing the global opportunity strategy, which has provided team with more degrees of freedom than the mid-and small-cap growth strategies, both of which have been impacted by the declining opportunity that I discussed earlier. Like the global opportunity strategy, global discovery strategy will give the growth team increased degrees of freedom. After the strategy is up and running we will have more to say about it and how it relates to the growth team's other three strategies. Turning to slide 5, degrees of freedom are only helpful if you have the right talent to use them. Since 1994, Artisan has been identifying and recruiting talented and unique individuals and partnering with those individuals to develop investment franchises. Use the credit team is an example, because the team's story is played out since we have been a public company holding these quarterly calls. Slide five shows screenshots from four of our prior calls. In the third quarter of 2013, we explained the right kind of talent for Artisan. We look for individuals who are or who can become recognizable leaders and who are committed to an investment philosophy and process that they believe in and that differentiates them from others. We found that kind of leader and Brian Krug, Brian joined us in the fourth quarter of 2013. Once on board, we provided Brian with a full range of support, helping him find and hire talent, filling out a new office in Kansas City and launching a first strategy. We minimize the amount of time that Brian had to spend on these and other business matters, allowing him and his team to focus on investment. After three years, the team's investment performance placed a high income strategy in the first percentile of its high-yield peers since inception and the strategy raised assets at an unprecedented rate for a new Artisan team both of which we discussed on last quarter's conference call. On slide six, you can see the progress that the credit team has made. Brian has put together a talented team of five experienced analysts and a trader. The team has come together nicely and is establishing a unique culture. Since inception, the high income strategy has generated average annual returns of 7.2% and 226 basis points of average annual outperformance, both net of management fees. As the team came together and expanded its knowledge base and coverage capabilities, the natural next step was to launch a second strategy, which we did in June. We seeded the new strategy with a $20 million investment and raised an additional $13 million from employees and directors of the firm. Because we are offering a strategy to investor through a private funds structure, we can't say much about the strategy on a public call or in public documents. The private funds structure should offer the credit team additional degrees of investment freedom not available on a 40 act upon. Those additional degrees of freedom include ability to invest in less liquid instrument, use of leverage, shorting and use of a broad range of instruments. The credit team is a good study and how we can use data strategy, execute and report back. With respect to recruiting new talent and adding degrees of freedom, we have been very clear about our strategy. We found a way to talk to lots of people and we are regularly considering whether certain individuals would be the right fit. The right talent for Artisan is scarce, difficult to find and difficult to recruit. Likewise, adding degrees of freedom cannot be forced. Investment teams need the right knowledge and skills, operation and infrastructure must be in place to support them and we cannot surprise client. When we do find the right talent, we have the resources and experience to build a team, design and launch strategies and add degrees of freedom. Our ability to resource existing and new investment teams has only increased, as we have gained new experience with both Brian and its credit team and Chris and the Thematic team. And with the addition of Jason Gottlieb, as our chief operating officer of investments. As I mentioned earlier, we believe in quality over quantity. So we are very selective when it comes to new teams and strategies. Each team and strategy is important as we did with the credit team. We have communicated our early step with the developing world and Thematic team. We expect both teams to be as successful at the credit team over time. On slide seven you can see how recent investment returns have growth our AUMs from $95 billion at the end of June 2016, to $109.4 billion at the end of the last quarter. Over that period AUM growth from investment returns have been partially offset by firm-wide net outflows of $3 billion, primarily resulting from $4.4 billion and $2.3 billion of net outflows from our non-US growth and US mid-cap growth strategies. For the same trailing 12 month period, our three global strategies and our high income and developing world strategies have combined net inflows of $5.8 billion, demonstrating that there are significant demand for high value-added, active investment strategies, especially strategies that gives talented investors broad flexibility to generate returns and manage risk./ On the chart we include the green 2016 line as a reminder of the unusually smooth ride thus far in 2017. Market volatility has been low and has been a notable absence of market drawdown. That has been nice, but as we have said since our IPO, we expect things to be bumpier. We have designed and operated our business with an expectation that market returns will be fickle and net flows will be lumpy for like 2016 than 2017. I will now turn it over to C.J. to discuss her financial results.