Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for our webcast announcing U.S. Global Investors Results for First Quarter Year 2019. I'm Holly Schoenfeldt. If you have any questions during the webcast, you can enter them in the questions area of the control panel side bar, which is normally to the right of your screen. Also, you may download a PDF of today's slides by clicking on the red handout button. 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, Marketing and Public Relations Manager. 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 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 Slide 4, you'll see a quick overview of U.S. Global. We are an innovative investment manager with vast experience in global markets and specialized sectors founded as an investment club. The Company became a registered investment advisor in 1960 and have a long standing history of global investing and launching first of their kind investment product, including the first no-load gold fund. U.S. Global is well known for expertise in gold and precious metals, natural resources and emerging markets. And now on Slide 5, I'm going to pass it over to Frank Holmes, CEO and CIO for an overview of the period. Frank?

Thank you, Holly. Listen, I've just flown in red-eye from [indiscernible] speaking at a mining conference -- Institutional Mining Conference in Miami. So you hear the noise, I'm flying in again. So hopefully, that helps the Jets ETF. So the strengths -- the growth strengths are strive to go-to stock, exposure in emerging markets, resources gold and digital currencies. We're debt-free. We have a strong balance sheet with a reflective cost structure. And I'll talk about that as where we continue to streamline our team, cost structure later in the presentation, and the monthly dividend return on cap equity discipline. I want to thank all the top institutional holders of GROW, the Royce & Associates, Perritt Capital Management, FIM, Paul Sutherland and his team, BlackRock Institutional Trust Company and Toroso Investments. When we take a look at it, we've consistently paid dividends for past 10 years, with a modest yield. The boards approved the repurchase of up to $2.75 million of outstanding common stock. And for this past year, we've parked it very little bit, because we use a quant model that basically buys on down days. So it has the -- it's the volatility, whereas only when it's on very volatile down days, it automatically triggers a buy. And I'd like to hop on to Slide Number 9. You see the balance sheet remain strong with no debt. And Lisa can talk a little bit more about that. And earnings per share quarterly, we'll talk a bit more how we're being impacted by the volatility of long term investments, which was really the worst quarter I've ever seen where we've made two strategic investments. And we've been subject to different reasons but seen early investors in both those companies -- and so it had liquidity events, one had a…

Thank you, Frank. Good morning. Now I'll discuss the results of operations for the quarter ending September 30 2019. Beginning on Page 24, we recorded total operating revenue of $904,000 for the quarter, which is a decrease of $319,000 or 26% from the $1.2 million in the same quarter last year. This decrease is primarily due to decreases in assets under management related to shareholder redemption. Operating expenses for the current quarter were $1.7 million, a decrease of $187,000 or 10%, primarily due to the following reasons; employee compensation and benefits decreased $58,000 or 7%, mainly due to decreases in salary expense; and general and administrative expenses decreased $107,000 or 11%, primarily due to decreases in fund expenses. We see our operating loss for the quarter ending September 30, 2019 is $815,000. On Slide 25, we see that other income and loss for the quarter was a loss of $3 million, and was mainly related to unrealized losses on investment. And non-operating losses increased $2.1 million in the same quarter in the prior year. Net loss attributable to USGI after taxes for the quarter was $3.6 million, a loss of $0.24 per share, which is a decrease of $2.4 million compared to the net loss of $1.1 million or $0.08 per share for the same quarter in the prior fiscal year. Moving to Slide 26, we still have a strong balance sheet, it includes high levels of cash and unrestricted marketable securities that combined made up 67% of our total assets. And on Page 27, we see -- we still have no long term debt and our only long term liability is our lease obligations. The company had a net working capital of $10.7 million and a current ratio of 8.9:1. With that, I'll turn it over to Holly.

Thanks, Lisa. And before we jump into our sales and marketing efforts, I wanted to briefly go over some of the recent trends in the mutual funds and ETF industry, just to help us better understand where we are and where we're headed next. So on Slide 30, you can see the number of mutual funds entering and exiting the industry. And this chart comes from the 2019 ICI Fact Book. It shows that the total of 345 mutual funds opened in the year 2018. Fewer equity and taxable bond fund launches contributed to the decline in the number of new mutual funds offered from 2017 to 2018. Slide 31 shows net new cash flow going in the mutual funds, which does present a headwind for us. And you can see that overall demand for mutual funds, as measured by net new cash flow, weakened considerably in 2019 -- 2018, excuse me. On Slide 32, we'll shift our focus over to exchange traded funds. The U.S. ETF market was $3.4 trillion in total net assets at year-end 2018, remained the largest in the world with the vast majority of assets in U.S. ETFs. Also in funds registered with and regulated by the SEC under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Growth here remains essentially flat, although, still positive. And then on Slide 33, a majority of our mutual fund assets are in emerging markets and natural resources, while 32% are in domestic equities and fixed income. And as for distribution, more than three quarters of assets come from retail investors with 18% coming from institutional investors. Our sales and marketing efforts have continued to focus on our mutual funds, including those concentrated on gold, natural resources and emerging markets, as well as our ETFs. And helping in these efforts is…

Thank you, Holly. So on Slide 44, we're looking at one of the two main drivers of gold prices, and that's the love trade, the other being the fear trade. And of those two, the most significant is the love trade. It accounts for about 16% of global demand every single year. This is something we've discussed quite a lot for loyal readers of Frank Talk and investor alert. We've seen a strong correlation between rising incomes in China and India over the years and higher gold prices. And that's because, in India specifically, there are days that are considered to be auspicious to buy gold and to give gold as gifts. Hindus around the world just celebrated Diwali and coming up in China is the Chinese New Year during which it's also customary to buy gold and give gifts of gold jewelry. It's important to point out though that India -- jewelry buying in India was down slightly in the third quarter according to the World Gold Council, because of higher gold prices, which had an impact on purchases in that country. Since 2010, we've seen central banks around the world become net buyers of gold from net sellers of gold. They're trying to diversify away from the U.S. dollar. And year-to-date actually through the end of the third quarter, purchases surpassed 500 tonne, that's more than any other equivalent period and also 12% up from last year. Again, that's according to the World Gold Council's recent report on the third quarter. The other side of the coin, so to speak, is the fear trade, which accounts for about 40% of global demand for gold. And this includes fear of interest rate or uncertainty of where interest rates are headed, that's a monetary side. And on the fiscal side,…

Thank you, Joseph. And as we wrap up today's presentation, I just want to remind everyone, you can enter questions that you have in the control panel on your screen. Also, you can submit questions directly to us at any time by e-mailing info at usfunds.com. We will be following up with questions this round within the next few days. And with that being said, this concludes U.S. Global Investors' webcast for the first quarter of fiscal year 2020. This presentation will be available on our Web site at usfunds.com. Thank you all for your participation. End of Q&A: