U.S. Global Investors, Inc. Class A Stock

[Audio Gap] in on 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.

On Slide #3, some quick disclosures. 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-K 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 Investors accepts no obligation to update them in the future.

On the next slide, we're always grateful for the continued support of our valued shareholders. If you'd like to receive one of our signature U.S. Global Hats featured here just send your mailing address to [email protected] and we'll gladly ship one out to you.

All right. On the next slide, I will briefly review the company. U.S. Global Investors is an innovative investment manager with vast experience in global markets and specialized sectors. We use a quantamental strategy to create thematic smart beta 2.0 products. The company was originally founded as an investment club, becoming a registered investment adviser in 1968 and has a long-standing history of global investing and launching first-of-their-kind investment products, including the first no-load gold fund.

Finally, we're experts in thematic investing. In particular, gold and precious metals, natural resources, airlines and luxury goods, all using a quantamental approach that includes both macro and micro factors.

Moving on to the next slide. We often begin our presentations with this slide, which we refer to as the DNA of volatility. As a reminder, that market swings are a normal part of long-term investing.

With that in mind, I will now turn it over to our CEO and CIO, Frank Holmes, to walk us through the fiscal year and share his macro outlook for the quarter. Frank?

The DNA of volatility is so important for investors to really appreciate volatility of asset classes are different and the same thing with individual stocks within a category. The S&P is the biggest benchmark. It's plus or minus 1%. Daily is a nonevent, meaning 70% of the time, that's what happens and over 10 days is 2%. Bullion is twice that number. And you can see oil has greater as greater volatility and Bitcoin on a daily basis, it's pretty well the same as oil and gold. But when we start going over 10 days, Bitcoin is more volatile because it's still emerging. The JETS ETF is plus or minus 3% because oil is the biggest line item besides all these other global issues and trade, you just get this increase in the volatility.

So it tells you and it explains basically that you should be looking to buy these things when they go minus 3% in a day or more, that's usually a better buy, and over 10 days, if they're down 6%, that's even a less risk by selling the same thing on the other side. But what's interesting is the New York Stock Exchange Airline Index it is greater than JETS when it takes take a look over 10 days.

But when I look at GOAU, which relates to gold, so we can see that GOAU goes up or down 3% in a day is a nonevent because gold, it tracks gold, 95% of the time, it's following gold and which is 2%. So a lot of the gold traders and price discovery are actually following Bullion, and then they'll look at for signals, they call them, that they would go and look at an ETF like GOAU. And you can see over 10 days, it's really a shocker it's plus or minus 9%. But if a big bulk of our assets are gold related and airlines related, you can see that it shows up in GROW stock, it's really simple. If we're seeing jets going up over 10 days, 6% or down 6% and gold stocks going up or down 9%, well, it shows up in GROW. So it's important to understand that relationship.

And then HIVE is just to give you an idea for Bitcoin mining and AI, it's very volatile, and it trades off of what's happening within NVIDIA and because it's a micro-cap compared to NVIDIA, it has even a greater volatility. Next, please.

On top, we thank the top institutional shareholders, Gator Capital and Capital Wealth Advisors. And Vanguard, I believe, is in one of their index products, but thank all those investors in our product for being invested in GROW. Next, please.

I own about 20% of the company and 99% of the voting control. This is to be in compliance with SEC rules for investment adviser. So it's just -- and that's where you need to have two classes of stock. Next, please.

Strategy and tactics. Our strategy is really simple. It's about winning. How do you win -- how does a product win in a category in the universe of all these ETFs and mutual funds and in the financial realm. So we believe that it's to create thematic products that are sustainable using our smart beta 2.0 strategy which requires rigorous backtesting of over thousands of hours before you launch a product.

In up cycles and down cycles, you have to go more than a decade and it gives you a real confidence factor. There's no guarantee that past performance is going to give you guarantee of future results, but it does give you a way to understand up and down cycles and how a weightings and various screens used to create a thematic basket of stocks.

And our mission is to make people feel financially happy and secure that their wealth is consistently growing but it's volatile, as you can see from previously, and that's what we try to educate investors and we won many awards on the education for that. Our strategy also is as a public company because we believe that we're deeply undervalued that we buy back the stock using an algorithm flattened down days. And we managed to preserve cash for future growth opportunities and market corrections. And we do make investments, and we make investments that are not directly, we have also in our funds but we do not buy something that's just for us and not the funds. We always make sure we go through a compliance if it is a good fit for the funds to be able to buy or not appropriate, then we would turn around and make certain investments.

And the other part we have found in this world has changed a lot with wholesalers and the digital world is the subscriber base and followers. We're continuously doing everything to grow that base because we hold our own webcast and the followers, it's important for communicating with investors and then increase our exposure to the Bitcoin ecosystem. We have bought some like the ETFs that pay monthly dividends and give you the upside, but at the same time, waiting out these corrections that you're getting an attractive dividend. Next, please -- and we have exposure and investments very minor today in HIVE, but we still have an investment in HIVE.

The marketing strategy, I think that's important to hear is what Steve Jobs said, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future but how well you look in the back. Next, please.

So I want to give you some indication on some ICI factors because we still have mutual funds and ETFs, and ETFs are growing faster. But mutual funds are really still a significant portion of the overall assets even though ETFs are growing faster, there's still a big component. And when you look at data from the Investment Company Institute, the 72 million households own mutual funds and 52% were headed by someone 35 to 64. But we find our investors are more like the upper end of 64 but where the industry for ICI comes in is that there's many corporations. And you can see that $13.7 trillion in long-term mutual fund assets held by defined contribution plans and IRAs representing about 62% of household assets. So mutual funds continue to still have assets, and a lot is going into the fund flows is going from employer-sponsored retirement plans. Next, please.

But when you're marketing to them, it's very different than ETF. So let me help educate that difference. So ICI Fact Book, the ETF surpassed $13 trillion in assets. And what's really evolved here is that it's predominantly a smaller account that's doing it, unless you get tax efficiency, monthly paying specialty funds that give you a return on capital model. They've had some big growth. But I think that the majority is small as much more retail and it's also institutional. And what happens is that a lot of institutions will use that to go short or against these positions, and that's a big source of revenue to low-cost ETFs. They make additional revenue from lending out those securities.

And it's -- we've seen this in JETS, in particular, that when Spirit was going bankrupt, that when there was many institutions were shorting Spirit, but they would go long JETS to do that Pairs trade, and they would borrow from it. So they were making a bet against that particular airlines. And so we have -- we made a lot of money for the shareholders in JETS from the securities lending. Next, please.

RIAs, which is positive for us are rotating to real assets says AdvizorPro. The data is a war in Iran. You've seen a lot of big interest is up 265 percent basically of interest in the oil patch. And then especially, I see in the oil patch of the refineries. They're making money hand over fist. Natural resources because of China playing games on restricting the supply of rare metals and other minerals that there's a big spend now by the federal government, to improve the supply lines and natural resource as a whole are doing exceptionally well, and commodities are also doing well. So we can see the big interest. Next, please.

But when it comes to ETFs, it's different factors and social media is the new classroom of financial education. I'm not a TikTok person, but it's amazing how many people are on there talking about Bitcoin or gold and government debt and then people recommending different types of allocation models. So it's pretty rich what's going on.

I think the biggest is YouTube. I personally enjoy looking at YouTube. Reddit, really often controversial left to more left when it comes to the political opinions, which I always find really interesting to offset other opinions, and X does everything to be in the middle. But it's a big source for active investors are using Reddit, and so do the ChatGPT and so does Claude and Perplexity quite often they're scanning and looking for articles and information, they will go to Reddit besides Wikipedia and other platforms. So a lot of people are using these platforms for getting ideas. Next, please.

So something on the journey I learned about JETS years ago, Graham Stephan is now up to 5.2 million. That means he's making about 5 million a year. He has an earlier one several years back 4 years ago that talks about the first starting and making $4,000 with YouTube getting paid for shared revenue, and basically, it's $1 million for every million subscribers. So he's a real estate guy that has gone full time in this end of the business. And Andrei in the middle here, he's always got the world coming to an end, does great geopolitical stuff, but it's a little sometimes aggressive. But it's kind of 3.3 million followers. So that's very impressive. And then Humphrey Yang, he's got 2 million subscribers. These people do influence because the market is how many followers they have. Next, please.

So when it came to JETS there was big flows were into it, I was told, "don't you know who Sam Chui?" I said "no, Sam Chui, who?" He has 3.7 million subscribers. And he is not a pilot. But the other two here, Captain Joe and Mentour Pilot, they have mix of subscribers can talk about the airline industry which predominantly is a lot of young millennials that are trading these products. Next, please.

No, they're not recommending ETFs, these airline people they just give you all these facts about what is the best business line, what is the best flight and other interesting topics. And amazes you is that so many people are interested in the airline industry. And I do know and remember vividly in 2020 when all the analysts on Wall Street were capitulating and get rid of all the airlines of Warren Buffett blew out in June of 2020, all of his Delta position, and now he's a player back in again. But what's interesting is that the big recommendation was coming from Reddit. And saying that every time they've had a crisis, the JETS fall 60% to 70% and a year later, they're up 130%, 120%. And that's what happened.

So I think that what we witnessed here is that billions of dollars come in into that type of product and is live it's done basically the model for which you're paying only 60 basis points has outperformed the New York Stock Exchange Global Airline Index.

So we end up coming up with a new product called WAR and defense spending is a macro trend ever since Putin invaded Crimea. But what's really important here, as you can see in this visual when the Berlin Wall fell, there was a lot of negotiating of streamlining and cutting back on the U.S. military into 9/11. And you can see this very vividly, then after 9/11, our spending increased dramatically. And we can see that recently under the Ukraine invasion spend picked up again. So people are deeply concerned in Europe and particularly Eastern Europe. And Trump has really -- also pushed to hold them all accountable for their 2% and now they're going to 5%. And we're doing about $2.9 trillion. So think of a big funnel of money coming, rushing down going into a sector, and there are certain industries that are going to truly be more significant, and I'm a big theory believer that it's going to be AI related, and that includes data centers is one. Next, please.

So what is -- what do we do? And it's about growing the dividends and growing the cash flow. Our current stock price, the monthly yield is 2.83%. And we continue to pay this monthly. We've not increased the dividend. We've been more focused on buying back stock in the past few years. I'll give a little more color on the next slide.

So the company believes the stock is deeply underbid and therefore, buys back shares when the price is flat or down using an algorithm. Next, please.

And during 20 -- fiscal 2026, company repurchased 733,848 Class A shares using $2 million in cash. And just before COVID, we reduced the shares outstanding by approximately 20%. Next, please.

So that gives you an idea of the volatility is a key factor here. If there's a big selloff, there's more down volatility, then our buying picks up. Next, please.

What's really important, I think, for investors is what Faber came out with shareholder yield. It's a better approach to yield investing and what he does he looks at your free cash flow on your cash flow and how much stock are you buying back, how much dividends and how much debt you're paying down overall, that gives you a better return on the capital. Next, please.

So shareholder yield is dividends plus buybacks plus debt reduction divided by market cap. Next, please.

So U.S. Global Investors committed to return value to our shareholders when compared to the treasury yields. So you can see here that the 5 year has risen, so is the 10-year, but our overall yield because of the stock buybacks is 7.87%. Next, please.

GROW over longer term, we can see has outperformed the Russell Microcap Growth Index. Next, please.

So two platforms, two investor audiences. So let's compare Schwab versus Robinhood. Schwab is $11 trillion in assets, revenue is $367 billion. Accounts and customers, Charles has almost 39 million or 30.5 million active brokerage accounts whereas Robinhood is 27.5 million. But the average assets per account customer is 309,000 versus Robinhood's 13,000. So Robinhood really caters to price discovery, younger investor, but you need price discovery to bring in institutions. Charles Schwab is predominantly RIA asset allocators. Next, please.

So this is a comp to give you an idea of where we fit in roughly the middle on price to EBITDA, shareholder yield, you could see these differences. Next, please.

Average assets, so they were incrementally increasing, and they had a great pop last month, and now they seem to have sold off. It's very, very volatile overall. Next, please.

Net income on the big bump in assets, we've done better. Next, please.

One of the real key people for institutions is that a well-diversified portfolio should be 5% to 15% in gold and Bitcoin. And I think it's just important to recommend that people read his book, you can get his -- on LinkedIn, he's following all of the work he's done. And it's quite significant as an educator. Next, please.

So what makes gold so attractive, well, a big part is modern monetary theory. It's basically a rising real debt as a real consequences and the future doesn't wait. It's always trying to figure out where it's going to be. And we're $350 trillion that's last year. So I think it could be even higher. Next, please.

Central banks. So now we have modern monetary theories being practiced by the G20 countries. Whenever there's a problem just print more money, and we're seeing now witnessing a big push that a lot of debt funding is to arm these countries with AI. So we're in an interesting dilemma that most of these countries have huge GDP debt levels and the money now is not going so much for social welfare, it's going more for military spending. And we have a big push by China, trying to recommend America to get out of U.S. stocks and buy gold, buy something that has long-term assets. So it's interesting to see that debate.

But this visual here is to show you that during COVID was the only drop in slowing down and buying gold, but then they had a big surge to 180 -- sorry, what's 1,081,as you can see. Next, please.

That means tons of gold big buy. I mean it's really remarkable to see how much gold China. But if China wants to catch up with America, I think they have to buy 100% of all the mine production for the next 7 or 8 years.

This is China's official gold reserves since he became dictator for life, you can see big pop. Next, please.

Quantamental approach to smart beta 2.0. We use a quantamental approach, which is basically quant and fundamentals to investing, requiring a broad and deep understanding of global economic trends, policies and geopolitical events. Our smart beta 2.0 investment strategy integrates advanced analytics with data-driven decisions. And I think momentum in revenue cash flow are also important factors. Next, please.

Gains seen across the thematic lineup. When Trump came out with his Freedom, it's on April 2, it's interesting because everything is sold off, I think $5 trillion around the world, and it came back and SEA has outperformed the S&P 500 by wide, wide, wide margin. And it's the best barometer that I know for the arteries and veins of the world. And so that continues to be an important product along with WAR, but WAR is much more volatile. Here are some of the companies we own. There's SEA ETF because it climbs higher spot this summer. And you could see JETS also. Next, please.

This to me is one of my favorite because you can see how WAR has far outperformed the S&P Aerospace & Defense Select Industry and the S&P 500. So money being raised deficit spending, triggering people buying gold and triggering people buying anything that has to do with rebuilding NATO with AI. Next, please.

Now I'm going to turn it over to Lisa Callicotte, our CFO.

Good morning. First, I'll start with the next slide, which is our financial highlights for fiscal year 2026. Our average assets under management were $1.53 billion, for the year, and our operating revenues were $10.3 million, and we had a net income of $3.1 million or $0.24 per share.

This slide kind of breaks down our earnings. It shows that we have operational earnings, which is related to our advisory services, but we also have investment earnings, which includes both realized and unrealized gains and losses on our investments. Both of these combined are our total earnings, but they are also both based on market fluctuations.

The next slides will give us a little bit more detail into our operations for the year ending June 30, 2026. First, we see that our operating revenues were $10.3 million for the year, and this is an increase of $1.8 million or 21% from the $8.5 million of revenue in prior year. The increase was primarily due to increases in asset under management especially in our gold and natural resource funds. Operating expenses for the quarter were $10.9 million or 5% lower than prior year.

On the next slide, we see operating loss for fiscal year June 30, 2026, was $603,000 or a favorable change of $2.4 million compared to fiscal year 2025. Other income for the year ended June 30, 2026 was $4.5 million compared to $2.7 million in the prior year, an increase of approximately $1.8 million, mainly due to higher unrealized gains in investments.

Net income after taxes was $3.1 million or $0.24 per share, which was a favorable change of $3.4 million compared to the loss of $334,000 or $0.03 per share in fiscal year 2025.

Moving on to the balance sheet. The next couple of slides show that we have a strong balance sheet. It includes high levels of cash and the next one, you can also see more of our investments.

On the following page, you see our liabilities, and these are consistent with prior year.

And then the next slide, you see our stockholders' equity. We have a net book value of $45.1 million. We have net working capital of $35.7 million and a current ratio of 19.7:1.

With that, I will hand it over to Holly to discuss marketing and distribution.

Thank you, Lisa. All right. On the first slide in my section, I want to quickly highlight a webcast that we recently hosted in collaboration with the team at The Wealth Advisor focused on the $1 trillion defense opportunity. Frank Holmes was joined by retired Lieutenant General, John Evans to discuss how the defense landscape extends far beyond traditional military hardware and why capital is increasingly flowing into AI, cybersecurity and autonomous systems. If you didn't get a chance to tune in, we'd be happy to send you the presentation, so shoot us an e-mail at [email protected].

On the next slide, I want to highlight a brand-new podcast that U.S. Global has launched called Return on Ideas, where we will be focusing on the people, the innovations and the ideas that are shaping the world we live in. The very first episode went out just this week, and you can expect to see new episodes every other week. Be sure to check it out on the U.S. Global YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts.

Moving on. This slide shows some of our new interactive research pieces that if you have not checked out yet, I highly recommend that you do. The first is part of a new infographic series we're launching that examines the power challenges behind AI and the other two are interactive reports that explore what's driving the price of gold as well as what's driving oil and natural gas prices and shaping the global energy landscape. You can find all of these on the Resources tab on our website.

On the next slide, I want to highlight our continued investment in delivering timely original market insights across digital platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. These channels allow us to communicate directly with both current and prospective shareholders and provide greater visibility into our views on the markets and the broader investment landscape. If you haven't already, I encourage you to visit our YouTube channel and subscribe to stay informed on our latest content.

All right. On the next slide, we always like to look back at the most read Frank Talk blog posts from the recent quarter. As you can see here, the top theme centered around AI, defense, the rise in oil prices, and we published one or two posts each week covering a range of market and industry topics that align with the sectors and themes we invest in. If you're already a subscriber and find the content valuable, we encourage you to share it with friends or professional contacts who may be interested in it as well. Subscription is completely free.

Finally, on my last slide, I do encourage all of you to follow us on social media, on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram and Facebook. So wherever you prefer to get your news, be sure to check us out. This way, you're up to date with what's going on with GROW, our funds and our broader market insights.

All right. As a reminder to our audience, if you have any questions today, please e-mail those to [email protected], and we will gladly follow up with you to get anything clarified that you may need more information on.

Thank you so much for tuning in today. That concludes our webcast summarizing the 2026 fiscal year.

[Audio Gap] As you can see on 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.

Moving on to the next slide. 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 Investors accepts no obligation to update them in the future.

On Slide #4, we're always grateful for our continued support of our valued shareholders. So if you'd like to receive one of our signature U.S. Global hats featured here, just send us your mailing address to [email protected], and we will gladly ship one out to you.

All right. Moving on to the next slide, I will briefly review the company. U.S. Global Investors is an innovative investment manager with vast experience in global markets and specialized sectors. We use a quantamental strategy to create thematic Smart Beta 2.0 products. The company was originally founded as an investment club, becoming a registered investment adviser in 1968 and has a long-standing history of global investing and launching first-of-their-kind investment products. Finally, we are experts in thematic investing, in particular, gold and precious metals, natural resources, airlines and luxury goods, all using a quantamental approach that includes both macro and micro factors.

Moving on to the next slide. We often begin our presentations with this slide, what we call the DNA of volatility. As a reminder, that market swings are a normal part of long-term investing.

With that in mind, I would like to hand it over to our CEO and CIO, Frank Holmes. Frank?

Thank you, Holly. As Holly points out that volatility is so important to appreciate. These numbers always change when global factors such as a stock like we know Tesla when it went into the S&P 500 volatility dropped. Gold bullion when the ETF was created, its volatility dropped. So other events can turn around to increase volatility. And it's a nonevent for Bitcoin to go up 3% in a day or down and the same thing with the airline index. And the same numbers happen over, as you can see here, over 10 trading days versus gold. And gold stocks are even more volatile than gold.

Next, please. I want to thank our shareholders, Gator Capital Management seeing our deep value, owning 7.95% and 6% by Capital Wealth Advisors and Vanguard's Index.

Next, please. As a CEO and CIO, I own approximately 19% of the company and have approximately 99% of voting control. This is a structure that is to be in compliant with '40 Act and rules for running money management companies.

Next, please. So strategy and tactics, create thematic products, look for a rigorous process of back testing thousands of hours before launching a product for its resiliency in both up and down cycles. Our mission is to make people feel financially happy and secure that their wealth is consistently growing. Consistently is really an important part when we look longer term. Short term, we can see periods where gold, which is well known for, can trade sideways or be down. But over this century and over this decade, it's had phenomenal performance. And over the past 5 years, it's really kicked in over the past 2 years. So it's recognizing over longer time periods.

We strategically buy back our stock using an algorithm on flat and down days and managed to preserve cash for future growth. Please, we do love when we get more subscribers for their thought processes. So feel free to subscribe and something that we look to increase in a very competitive marketing to drive down marketing costs is to develop followers. And we increased our exposure to the Bitcoin ecosystem because we did launch HIVE, the first crypto mining company to go public, which is a dual engine, both data centers, Tier 1 for Bitcoin mining, but Tier 3 is now building AI factories.

Next, please. So I'm going to quickly go back and over the capital markets for you and our products and how they're aligned with them. But in that thought process, the great line from Steve Jobs, you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust the dots will somehow connect to your future. And that's really a thought process that also shows up in Smart Beta 2.0 is back testing, seeing if you can connect the dots, what are the factors for portfolio construction as well as different themes have different key factors for stock picking.

Next, please. The trend continues. Mutual funds continue to see redemptions as ETFs continue to grow. And what's really important for us is to see the active managed ETFs are growing.

Next, please. The total U.S. ETF market remains the largest in the world. As you can see from ICI fact book, the total assets have surpassed $13 trillion.

Next, please. So the rise of active ETFs, active ETFs attracted $500 billion in net inflows in '25 and more than 80% of ETF launches in '25 were active. This is a big difference from when we first launched JETS. In Q1 '26, active ETFs were attracting nearly as much money as passive ETFs.

Next, please. I really point out that I think Cathie Wood has been really instrumental in the creation and success when she was able to balloon to $100 billion in technology suite of ETFs and really capture the whole boom in Bitcoin early and Elon Musk building Tesla, being an early pioneer and being active and counseling to her is really research. And the thought process is that people can download and look at research at the same time, see how she looks to participate through her products. So I think that was a major game changer. And in that context, the company, we believe its stock is deeply undervalued and continuing to buy back shares when the price is flat or down, as I mentioned earlier. And this is part of the company's 2-pillar strategy to enhance shareholder value by paying dividends as well as buyback amounts per year.

Next, please. For 3 months ended March 31, the company repurchased a total of 176,592 Class A shares using cash of approximately $534,000. And since [ 12 ] of 2019, we have shrunk the shares outstanding by approximately 20%.

Next, please. Grow buybacks. This is just looking at the past 4 quarters, as you can see, if markets become volatile and down, we end up buying more on the down periods.

Next, please. So the key factor in this sort of thought process is what's called total shareholder yield. That's dividends plus buybacks plus debt reduction. And since we don't have debt, it's really focused on dividends and buyback divided by the market cap.

Next, please. So on a comparative analysis, you can see that basically our monthly dividend is $0.0075. That works out to a present yield of about 3.4%. And I think if we flip over to the next visual, it's really helpful to put this in context because the dividend growth model is really comparing dividends against 5-year government bond yields. And you can see that our yield is slightly as just a dividend cash is slightly less than a 5-year, but with the stock buybacks, that total shareholder yield is 9.96%. So this just begs the thought process of continuing to buy back the stock and makes it a very compelling investment.

Next, please. Assets of $1.63 billion and operating revenue of $2.8 million quarterly.

Next, please. Average assets under management have been increasing, which is positive and constructive in the sort of the volatile markets we live with. It doesn't matter a year ago, we had -- which is really, to me, interesting, the contrary is Liberation Day on April 2 and how that impacts the assets and how we've slowly climbed out of that correction and some of our products have done exceptionally well even with the negative doubts.

Next, please. Quarterly EBITDA per share is basically showing you some of the volatility. Lisa will give you more granularity. And if you want more details, you can feel free to phone her, reach out and walk you through some of the swings we've experienced. But looking back at the quarter of June of last year, that included April Liberation Day, assets fell, assets rallied slowly from there. And we've also had some other GAAP reporting issues that create this sort of noncash volatility.

Next, please. We like to compare. WisdomTree is 100% ETFs. Invesco is 40%. We're 63% and sort of comparing our operating revenue, price to book, we are the deepest value. That's why we keep buying back our stock. We still generate higher returns on assets. Our pretax margins remain healthy. And our dividend yield is the highest and our price to EBITDA is extremely attractive when you compare it to the overall market.

Next, please. A well-diversified portfolio to 15% in gold is Ray Dalio, master of the universe of big hedge funds, the biggest to us, $136 billion, very quant disciplined, but also a big gold advocate as imbalances happen on a regular basis in the G20 countries between their monetary and fiscal policies, gold rises faster in those countries which have a bigger imbalance.

Next, please. So this is sort of connecting the dots. You can see here, gold has had a spectacular run since last year in the past 12 months from under $2,000 to over $5,500. It's corrected and now it's bouncing back. I think gold still remains very attractive for many fundamental reasons.

Next, please. And then one of the most compelling is a modern monetary theory. It basically is that governments this century have demonstrated a propensity to print their money out of any problem and saying that they will buy back that debt when the economy improves in their country, but they never do. So the debt continues to grow. And there's approximately 8 billion ounces of gold on the surface of the earth, but the money printing is faster than the gold is coming out of the ground or -- and gold is above the ground. So that lends it that real assets like gold become an attractive asset. And I think that it's just an important part in a diversified portfolio to protect your family's legacy and have a long-term exposure in particular to gold stocks.

Next, please. So one of the big factors of buying gold is not just the fear trade, which is negative interest rates and imbalance of MMT, has been the rising GDP per capita for countries like China and India, Middle East and Southeast Asia, where there's a huge cultural bias towards buying gold, especially on any corrections. And so we quite often like to look at gold in rupee terms and Chinese yuan terms, you can see they're up substantially in rupee terms for India. And when you put India and China together, it's 40% of the world's population. You throw in Southeast Asia, Middle East, you're over 50% of the world's population who buy gold for love. So the correlation there is the highest GDP per capita, the rising in these countries has demonstrated a continuous buying this century.

Next, please. What's really important for me as a money manager and U.S. Global and U.S. Investors is our gold equity stocks are now starting to show up as momentum stocks in the past year. This is fundamental. This happened in 2002, went on for 5 years, and gold stocks far outperformed the overall market. So this is a very positive telling sign of growth momentum in revenue and cash flow.

Next, please. So Gold Miners free cash flow has surged. As you can see this visual, even though it shows you gold is corrected, the overall free cash flow of the industry continues to rise faster than the overall S&P 500. So that's another reason why many of these stocks show up at IBD.

Next, please. Central banks continue to be net purchase of gold since 2010, but we can see the real acceleration has taken place since 2020. And we saw big increases in 2018 and '19, especially out of China when Xi Jinping became dictator for life, China kept buying back gold and gold and China continues even this past month are showing a robust buying of gold to try to legitimize their currency as a global currency.

Next, please. So we believe that government policies are precursor to change. And this is a classic example of what happened to silver when the U.S. government named Silver U.S. Strategic mineral. In November, we saw a huge increase in the futures market by hedge funds buying silver. It had a hyperlink run to almost $20 an ounce. And then the big correction took place because of more government policies with the CME increasing margins by 64% has gone through the correction and now has come off that bottom.

Next, please. So our approach to investing is a quantamental approach to Smart Beta, and it's well known now that we use this quantamental approach to investing requiring a broad and deep understanding of global economic trends, policies and geopolitical events. Our Smart Beta 2.0 investment strategy integrates advanced analytics with data-driven decisions, diversification and management risk, momentum and revenue and cash flow growth are very important. High free cash flow yield is also very important to generate higher cash flow returns on invested capital. But what we have found is that different assets, different themes have different factors for picking those stocks in that industry, that category. And further, we have found that the structure of the portfolio is very important when you do back testing.

Next, please. So building a smart thematic ETF platform, SEA, WAR, JETS, GOAU. Gold is up 300% GOAU since we launched it. JETS has done exactly what we thought it would outperform the New York Stock Exchange Global Airline Index. It's now these flags are showing you that JETS is listed in Colombia, it's in Mexico. It's also in Peru, so is GOAU. GOAU is listed in Colombia, Mexico and Peru. And recently, SEA is listed in Peru and Mexico. These will eventually get listed all through Latin America. And I think it's important that when we look at SEA, it's far outperformed the S&P this past year, even after the tariff spot on April 2, 2025, the whole world fell by $5 trillion. And then it's climbed right back, the S&P last year was up about 12%, but SEA was more than double that.

And WAR, which is basically AI for the rebuilding of military, it's had a spectacular year. I think it's over 12 months now. It's up over 50%. So it's done what it should have done, which are based on our models, so we're happy with that. And JETS just continues to fly over all the negative narrative if it falls short term with rising negative sentiment like the war in Iran. And immediately, you start to see the airlines this past quarter coming out with numbers far, far superior to global GDP and domestic GDP. So I think that the airlines are at sweet spot of being almost a leading indicator for global economic activity like SEA, cargo carries 80% of all commodities and finished products, heavy big products, and it really captures the arteries and veins of global travel -- sorry, world trade, whereas JETS is global travel.

Next, please. Again seen WAR and SEA amid international conflict sell off quickly and then go on to rise, totally contrary to what many people thought.

Next, please. Military expenditures, we keep highlighting, have hit a new all-time high. It's forecast to be 5% of GDPs in the next couple of years, which is now pushing $2.9 trillion. And it's pretty easy to figure out the 5 industries which are going to be benefit. But really, the focus for us has been AI in those industries like cybersecurity to making aircraft carriers or fighter jets. What we do see for the century since 9/11 took place that you can see that there has been a rise in spending globally, but you can also really see since Xi Jinping became dictator for life that America has increased its spending because China now has the largest military force in the world and maybe more military ships in the U.S.

Next, please. So AI, we've mentioned many times in our webcast is really key for cybersecurity. But for me, personally, it has also been really key for health care. I do the Galleri test every year that looks for over 200 precursors to -- looking for proteins for precursors to cancer and now the MRI that can look for tumors in your body that normal blood test may not capture. That could be the stage -- the stepping staging for cancer. So AI is really important for health care, cybersecurity, but key here for everyone listening is military spending. In 1989 under George Bush Sr., America went in and arrested Noriega, President of Panama for narco dealing and other corrupt activities, but 23 American soldiers were killed. Going into Venezuela, it was much more tricky because they had stacked themselves with a lot of Russian and Chinese surveillance equipment, radar equipment. But what's really key here is that no Americans were killed as we captured Maduro. So the idea of using AI is really quite profound when it looks at national security.

Next, please. And this has been our theme for the creating of WAR. What we're showing you here is these AI data centers are hyperlinking information between a Delta force on the ground to an aircraft carrier to a fighter jet in the sky to data from a satellite to a helicopter, bringing in, taking out Delta forces. So the use of AI will continue to be very significant for national security in addition to health care.

Next, please. And we believe we have the products that are lined up with that, like recognizing the future demand accelerated with compute and graphic processing, NVIDIA chips. And here I am with Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, the largest market cap company in the world. And so it continues as we -- as our investments in HIVE as it builds out its AI infrastructure.

Next, please. So we also look at some of these alternative investments that are illiquid. They wouldn't qualify for our funds, and we participate them so that we have our nose into what's going on in the world outside of listed public companies. And so we were able to participate Investec Series, and it was a $500,000 investment. And now it's looking to go public and the estimated value for our investment is up sevenfold. These things don't happen. Sometimes there's lumps and losses in this speculation. But we, as a company, as an investment company, not only invest in our own funds, we also invest in some real estate and the creation of new companies like we launched the creation of HIVE. We also make these other special investments so that we are in the information flow of where technology is going.

Next, please. Now I'm going to turn it over to hardworking Lisa Callicotte to give you more granularity on the financials for this past quarter. Lisa?

Thank you, Frank. Good morning. On the next slide, you can see that we're going to start with our financial highlights. Average assets under management were $1.63 billion for the quarter ending March 31, 2026. This is a 15% increase from the same quarter a year ago. Operating revenues were $2.8 million, an increase of approximately 31% compared to the same quarter last year, and we had quarterly net income of $2.6 million or $0.23 per share.

As we move on to the next slide, this slide is a reminder of our 2 main components of our earnings. We have operational earnings that consist of our advisory services, and we have other earnings, which mainly consist of realized and unrealized gains and losses on our investment holdings. But both the advisory earnings and the investment gains and losses fluctuate based on market forces.

On the next slide, we're going to go into more detail about our results of operations. Here, we see that our total revenues were $2.7 million for the quarter, which is an increase of $659,000 or 31% from the $2.1 million in the same quarter last year. The increase is primarily due to higher assets under management, especially in our gold mutual funds and our Gold ETF, GOAU. Operating expenses for the current quarter were $2.7 million, a decrease of $322,000 or 11%, primarily due to decreases in employee compensation of $143,000 or 11% and $138,000 or 57% decline in advertising expenses, which was primarily due to elevated expenses in the prior year related to the launching of our WAR ETF.

On the next slide, we can see our operating income for the quarter ending March 31, 2026, is $88,000. And that's compared to a loss of $893,000 for the same quarter in fiscal year 2025. Other income increased $1.1 million compared to prior year, mainly due to net unrealized gains in equity securities of $1.3 million in the current period compared to unrealized losses of $50,000 in the same quarter in the prior year. This was a favorable change of $1.4 million. Other income for the quarter includes a $1.9 million unrealized gain in the Investec Series investment Frank discussed earlier. In the current period, the company recognized $844,000 tax benefit compared to a tax expense of $137,000 in the March 31, 2025 quarter. This favorable change of $981,000 was primarily driven by discrete tax items, including a federal tax adjustment related to the tax treatment of certain HIVE convertible securities and a decrease in a valuation allowance.

In the December quarter, we recorded a tax expense related to the tax accounting method change, and we expected an offsetting benefit that was recorded in the March quarter. Net income after taxes for the quarter is $2.7 million or $0.23 per share, which is a favorable change of $3.1 million compared to the net loss of $382,000 or a loss of $0.03 per share for the same quarter ending fiscal year 2025.

On the next slide and the following slide, you see that we have a strong balance sheet and includes high levels of cash and securities.

Moving on to the next slide, you can see our total liabilities are $2.9 million.

And then the following slide shows our shareholders' equity. The company has a net working capital of $36.2 million and a current ratio of 20.9:1.

With that, I'll hand it over to Holly to talk about our marketing.

Thank you, Lisa. All right. The first slide in my section highlights several events that our marketing and investments team have recently attended as well as one that we are looking forward to in June. So in April, Frank Holmes delivered a keynote presentation at the Swiss Mining Institute Conference in Panama, where he also had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with management teams from many of the precious metals companies that we own. And then in May, members of our team attended the WISE Investment Summit, where Frank also spoke on the intersection of gold, defense and AI, 3 themes we believe are becoming increasingly interconnected. And also, we are excited to once again represent U.S. Global at Wealth Management Edge in June, which I believe will be our third consecutive year attending. And that event provides a valuable opportunity to connect with advisers and peers across the ETF industry.

All right. On the next slide, you will see our team representing U.S. Global Investors, a NASDAQ-listed company under the ticker symbol GROW at the official NASDAQ Texas kickoff event. The gathering brought together business and economic leaders to discuss the future of innovation, growth and capital markets in Texas and the important role our state can play going forward.

All right. Moving on. The next slide highlights our commitment to delivering timely and original market insights through our YouTube and TikTok channels, which both are powerful platforms for engaging new and long-time shareholders. So if you've not seen any of these, we do encourage you to visit our YouTube page and our TikTok page and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date on the latest content.

All right. Moving on to the next slide. We always like to recap the most read Frank Talk blog post during the recent quarter. And as you can see here, the top themes really focused around commodities, particularly oil prices and gold prices, and investors are focusing on gold and oil in 2026 because both of these assets are tied to several major macro themes shaping the markets right now, inflation concerns, geopolitical instability, fiscal deficits and it goes on. So if you're not a subscriber to Frank Talk, I highly recommend you do so at usfunds.com, and it is completely free.

Finally, on my last slide, I do encourage you to follow U.S. Global Investors across social media. We are on Twitter or X now, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. So wherever you prefer to get your news, be sure to check us out. This way, you're up to date with what's going on, not only with GROW and our funds, but the broader market as well.

All right. As a reminder to our audience, if you have any questions today, please e-mail those to [email protected] and we will gladly follow up with you to get anything clarified that you may need more information on.

So thank you so much for tuning in today. This concludes our webcast summarizing the third quarter of 2026.

[Audio Gap]

Introduce the presenters for today's program, which are Frank Holmes, U.S. Global Investors' CEO and Chief Investment Officer; Lisa Callicotte, Chief Financial Officer; and myself, Holly Schoenfeldt, Director of Marketing.

On the next slide, during this webcast, we may make forward-looking statements about 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 statements are made as of today, and U.S. Global accepts no obligation to update them in the future.

All right. On to the next slide. We're always grateful for our continued support of our valued shareholders. So if you'd like to receive one of our signature USGI hats featured here, just send us your mailing address to [email protected] and we'll gladly ship one out to you.

All right. On to the next slide. I want to briefly review the company. U.S. Global Investors is an innovative investment manager with vast experience in global markets and specialized sectors. We use a quantamental strategy to create thematic smart beta 2.0 products. The company was originally founded as an investment club, becoming a registered investment adviser in 1968 and has a long-standing history of global investing and launching first-of-their-kind investment products, including the first no-load gold fund. Finally, we are experts in thematic investing, in particular, gold and precious metals, natural resources, airlines and luxury goods, all using a quantamental approach that includes both macro and micro factors.

All right. Moving on to the next slide. We often open up our presentations with this slide known as the DNA of volatility. It's a helpful reminder that market fluctuations are a natural part of long-term investing. And with that perspective in mind, I do want to hand it now over to our CEO, Frank Holmes. Frank?

Thank you, Holly, and thank you, everyone, for listening to our presentation. And yes, there's no doubt it's important to recognize the DNA of volatility and managing life is about managing expectations. And it's a nonevent for gold, as you can see, and that's an important part of our assets to go up the same as the S&P 500. And I can share with you 10 years ago, that number was 2%. And 25 years ago, the daily volatility for gold was 3%. And for stocks, it was more like 9%. So the volatility has come down, but we do see gold stocks still exhibit 2x the volatility of the S&P and as you can see over 10 days, it's 6% volatility. And that's really important.

And when you look at Arca Airline, which is our biggest ETF, the volatility is also quite large. It's plus or minus 2% a day. And a lot of that has to come from the oil market, the volatility of oil because it's the biggest line item expense. And then 10 days is 7%. And Bitcoin is the same as the airline index when you look over 10 days, which is amazing to me. And HIVE Digital was a company we launched and created and cofounded in 2017 because it was -- we were unable to launch a Bitcoin ETF and it's been our proxy in that whole space.

Next, please. You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. In my storytelling today, I'm going to try to weave through the dots and connect them for you because I love that quote, and it's also really helpful when you go back and you use AI today. So often it uses [ Bayes' theorem ], which you can ask is something statistically relevant to the history over the past year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years or decades. It's a mathematical way, but it's looking back for the dots.

Next, please. So we're in an industry as fund managers and mutual funds and ETFs. And here is really important when we launched our first ETF it had to be -- active was not basically accepted. They want a fixed amount. And that's changed, as you can see, that actively managed ETF domestic funds are growing. They're being accepted much more as the growth of ETFs are uberizing mutual funds. And so we still see the net redemptions in actively managed domestic funds versus the ETF space. We still have our mutual funds, and we know that the providers that we partner with, they're going through that journey of how do you convert the ETFs. But I think that we're waiting for them to iron out that concept of that transition from a mutual fund to ETF. So we'll maintain where we have our active mutual funds. They do have higher fees. And in this big rally in gold in the past year and this year-to-date, it does have a bigger impact. When you look at our ETFs, it's 60 basis points for calculating revenue. But for the active, it's more like double that with a 12B-1. So there are higher fees for those asset classes.

Next, please. Investment industry 2025 recap that U.S. fund flows hold strong, especially into ETFs, even though there's so much negative news. It's -- '24, '25 were both very positive years. As you can see, '21 was huge. '22 came off. '20, we experienced our biggest growth going in between '20 and '21 during COVID, especially in the jets, which was the most fascinating experience I've ever had and realizing the significance of new disruptive brokerage firms like Robinhood and how many accounts were coming through Robinhood being totally contrarian that you found that the Wall Street was all negative on the airlines, but the Reddit crowd had done the research that after every global crisis, the airlines fall 60% to 70%, and then they go up 100% to 120%. And that's what happened with jets and those assets continue to grow. And then they came off in '22 with the market, and there was such negativity, but the airlines defy that. They've done a phenomenal job in revenue growth and sustainability.

Next, please. So record ETF inflows hit nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025, outpacing traditional stock fund flows. There was a launch of several that became billion-dollar products. They were single-purpose corporations where like MicroStrategy or you could take NVIDIA, you could take Tesla, and they would do a 20-day rolling covered writing program against that position. So your stock would go up, but not as much as the -- your ETF single base stock will go up. But it was interesting how retirement people would say, well, I want to be long NVIDIA and Tesla, but I'd rather get the monthly income waiting for it.

And that was a big growth part last year. It seems to have cooled off, but we saw that with gold bullion ETF, where the yields were about 12% and the Bitcoin ETF, which we own both of them, those yields running like 24% up to 30% yields on that rolling -- 20-day rolling model because of the volatility. So that has been -- some of our own investments are going into that to increase our overall income flow. And another reason for that, too, is because the HIVE convertible note we had is gone now. They paid it back, but its 8% coupon was gone. And so we've redeployed some of that money into other assets that -- for income and growth.

Next, please. I want to thank our top 3 shareholders here. You can see that Gator Capital Management and Vanguard and Perritt. Perritt has been around as a small-cap mutual fund group for a long period of time. And they are just a great group out of Chicago. Vanguard is in their index products and Gator Capital is a deep value looking for growth investments. And we're in some of the other ETFs that are out there and funds like BlackRock has an asset management ETF, and we would show up in theirs.

Next, please. So as CEO and Chief Investment Officer, I own about 19% of the company and approximately 99% of the voting control. That all has to do with 40 Act rules without making it complex for you. I have an independent Board of Directors with lots of mutual fund experience and private equity experience to be with as shaping and approving what we do. But -- and I have to go through this process of having an independent Board, the voting control is really predominantly for protecting mutual fund investors.

Next, please. Strategy and tactics. Create -- the big part for us was to get in the ETF space was to create the matter products that are sustainable using smart beta 2.0 strategy. It requires a rigorous back testing for thousands of hours. Our mission is to make people feel financially happy and secure that their wealth is consistently growing. It's always hard when you have thematic products because thematic products come and go in the sort of sentiment waves or you can have big government spending, which can help drive that. So we want to make sure that our product is priced competitively. And we know that at 60 basis points, we need to have $50 million basically to breakeven to cover the financial costs, such as audit and legal, but it really doesn't cover all the other portfolio and all the marketing costs, et cetera.

So we know that you need to have close to $80 million to start covering those other costs. When you go through $100 million of ETF it starts to be profitable for us in a very strong way. So that's the magic goal for any new product we launch. Strategically, we've been buying back our stock using an algorithm on flat and down days. We bought back just under 10% over the year, 18 months, I think we bought about 10%. But it was important is that when we start this program, it was about [ 50 million ] shares all out, and now it's a little over 12 million. So we've consistently been buying back, and we've been buying back more last year when it was just a depressed overall value with our cash.

We are very consumed with how we manage to preserve cash for future growth opportunities and market corrections. So we run a lean and mean shop. Bonuses are basically on performance, performance of the funds, performance of cash flow. If we don't have that big performance of assets and cash flow, I don't get a bonus and investment team, they also have that performance. We continue to look at M&A activity to acquire fund assets. We know that mutual funds trade at a big discount on the M&A because the redemptions continue as an asset class. Old investors stay with you. And quite often, they pass away and their kids take over and they want the cash or they want to go and trade ETFs. So we understand that sort of process, and we understand why M&A activity and fund business is a lot less.

But ETF business, well, that's different. ETFs have a much lower redemption. There's just -- you get much more trading with it. But what has the strongest in our ecosystem is registered investment advisers. They have the highest price to cash flow, price to multiple valuations if you're looking to go buy that business.

So I'm sharing this with you because we do keep in touch with what's going on in the industry. We grow our subscriber base and followers. That's been very important because we believe that long term, having intimate relationship, investors stay with you a longer period of time. And we've increased our exposure to the Bitcoin ecosystem predominantly as HIVE has been redeeming is buying notes that these ETFs that pay out monthly income.

Next, please. Why we buy back our stock? Well, the company believes the stock is undervalued and therefore, buys back shares of grow when the price is flat or down from the previous trading day using an algorithm. And this is part of the company's 2-pillar strategy to enhance shareholder value by paying the dividends as well as the buyback amount per year. Over the past several years, we have not increased the dividend. We have increased substantially our buyback dollar amount.

Next, please. So the current share repurchase program for the 3 months ended December 31, 2025, the company repurchased a total of 260,195 Class A shares using cash of approximately $664,000. And over the past 18 months, we have shrunk the shares outstanding by -- sorry, 18 months by approximately 10%.

Next, please. Grow buyback, to give you a recap, you can see by the quarter, the stock for whatever the reason why had more down days as gold was ripping and assets were growing, the negativity and the volatility was quite immense. And we said there was a great opportunity to buy back our stock, which we did.

Next, please. Shareholder yield is an important thought algorithm to take a look at what is the shareholder yield and the model is the dividends you pay, the dollars that you look at the total dollars paid in dividends, the total dollars in stock buybacks and then there's debt reduction. So we haven't paid down any debt because we don't have any debt. We've only had money that we've invested in and paid us back. So what you've seen is that you divide that by the market cap and you compare that to 5-year yields.

Next, please. The 5-year yield is an important factor. government bonds because that's what quite often dividend programs are compared to. Quant dividend -- my first model is in 1978 as a young analyst was a dividend growth model, and it was all comparing stocks that are increasing the dividend or the stock buyback, you want to buy those if the yield is higher than the 5-year government bond. If the 5-year government bond yield is higher, then you want to pull back. So it's an interesting model, and I share with you that the company has paid monthly dividends since 2000 -- you can see the current yield share price, but since 2007. So we have been paying and stayed pretty consistent in paying yields on a monthly basis. We're one of the few stocks that really companies that pay on a monthly basis. The Board has reviewed and approved the quarterly -- on a quarterly basis, the dividend.

Next, please. So the U.S. Global Investors is committed to returning value to shareholders when compared to treasury yields. Gross shareholder yield is 9.89%. The 10-year government bond is right now at 4.18% and the 5-year is 3.73%. And as I shared with you, that when at 9.89% reflects -- it's still a very attractive proposition for investors. And that is another reason why we'll continue to buy back our stock.

Next, please. Average assets under management in billions, we have $1.42 billion, down to $1.26 billion, back up to $1.4 billion, $1.48 billion, and now it's $1.7 billion approximately as of today. And we've seen the stock all of a sudden pop because there's many fund managers that look at the overall funds every day. They can look at total assets and they can do a quick approximation. So in real time, it's -- you could take a look at our overall assets and do a calculation as our revenue growing and what will that do to cash flow.

Next, please. The quarterly EBITDA per share over the last 4 quarters, you can see that it was negative last year and turned positive going into September. And in December, it was $0.04 a share. But when you look at earnings, Lisa will give you more color on this, the repayment and the high bond is gone. We have a separate audit firm, KPMG, that oversees just the tax and their analysis on it. Then we have Grant Thornton that does the funds and some calculation came out at the previous auditors, BDO, that things should have been done differently. So it has a swing in our earnings of going negative this quarter, but it comes back next quarter. So when this presentation, I thought it was just best to give you an idea that the EBITDA is improving, and we're very thrilled about that, and it gives us the ability to buy back stock in a very comfortable basis.

Next, please. So how do we compare? I like to compare against WisdomTree because they're 100% ETF I'd like to take a look at U.S. Global, which is almost 70% operating revenues related to ETF. Invesco, who owns QQQ, which is the biggest beast out there, 40% of their assets are QQQ. And so the look at who trades at the highest price to book, who trades the lowest, and you can see that WisdomTree, if you're a real GARP investor, deep value, then WisdomTree is overvalued and Invesco and U.S. Global is undervalued. If you look at a return on assets that WisdomTree has the highest return for return on our assets or 2.83%, but we're so liquid in respect that another $200 million, $300 million in assets and that return on asset starts to change dramatically. That's just important. And we've been through this run where we see that asset flow that we're so tightly wound that $1 billion on assets just explodes the financial returns and returns on assets.

On the pretax margins, WisdomTree is 36%. Invesco still has from their other assets, mutual funds and other funds, the challenges and they'll work them through. It's a good company, but U.S. Global is about 20%. The dividend yield for U.S. Global is less than Invesco and quite often in the public arena that if your pretax margins are negative and your yield -- the stock is sold down, so your yield is higher, and that's what we're seeing. WisdomTree had bigger ETF flows, which we explained to you earlier, there was a lot of flows in the industry, and they captured a fair amount. And with that, their stock price has appreciated. So therefore, their dividend yield is less unless they increase their dividend, which they have not seen.

And then we have price to EBITDA. So you can see that Invesco is the least -- is the cheapest, but it's because they have margin issues to wrestle with. And hopefully, the worst is behind for them. I think then they would pop. We're at 16. WisdomTree is at 13. So that would undertake to say that we're overvalued. But I would share with you $1 billion of assets going into WisdomTree versus $1 billion coming into grow, there's much more -- a bigger bang for the dollar coming into grow.

Next, please. And that's why we have a higher price to EBITDA. I believe and I'm sure some of the savvy hedge funds that own us, they would have different views on this. And that's what makes it -- they call it your mosaic and every asset class and every portfolio manager, they have different mosaics of prisms of how they look at different categories in the full spectrum of the capital markets ecosystem. Grow [ 3.17 ], $1.4 billion at year-end, now $1.7 billion, $2.5 million quarterly operating revenues.

Next, please. A look at Q2 for 2026. The company has a steady cash flow despite a volatile and challenging macro market environment. The company has a strong balance sheet, which includes both cash and other investments. So the company continues to buy back stock on flat or down days and pay a monthly dividend.

Next, please. Smart beta 2.0, it's an important thought process that we've sort of pioneered and the concept is both the portfolio design top down and then bottom-up factors that relate to a thematic product of the stock. So your stock weightings and then the individual names and what factors you use because we have found that factors for picking gold stocks are different than picking luxury goods that are different than picking global resources. And quite often, when you get into resources like global resources, you have to have a bigger weighting into a GARP products such as you would look at -- you want the lower EBITDA to enterprise value, cash flow to enterprise value, the cheaper, the better because there's tremendous mean reversion across the various resource industries.

But we believe that using smart beta factors and a thematic fund lineup sets us apart from our competition. Our quant approach back tested thousands of hours over decades of data to determine optimize portfolio construction stock factors to rebalance each quarter. As we've gone to monthly, it has changed some of this. But really, we're still keeping the weighting similar, but we're taking a look at other factors, especially in the gold space for GOAU. So we can capture more momentum that is taking place in the stock space. And we're seeing that in IBD last year for the first time in over a decade, gold stocks represent in the top 20 names, something like 40% are gold stocks because they have the strongest growth and momentum in revenue, cash flow and earnings. So they would show up. And that means these gold stocks are attracting other technology. What I love about IBD is that it's agnostic to the industry. It's more focused on the momentum value factors and institutional liquidity.

Next, please. So why gold and why we're a great proxy for the gold industry. Not only have we been writing for this and have over 100,000 readers in 80 countries. And if you're not a subscriber to Investor Alert and Frank Talk, it's free. I highly recommend it to you because it really is a great thought process from the investment team, along with myself on things I see and do that show up in unique writings and observations in capital markets.

But what's driving gold, especially this decade? Well, we get a lot of these gold bugs like I've experienced with the Bitcoin fanatics. And -- you find out that the fanatics really don't own much gold or Bitcoin. They just don't like governments. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican. They're very opinionated and you just have to sort of manage what they anchor to is the U.S. debt is out of control, it's going to crash, et cetera. And it is. It's very, very difficult of what's going. But you have to put it in a global context of what the other issues are besides this debt. And I'm going to walk you through if you use some of the gold bug original analysis of how they would forecast the price of gold, and I will walk you through that. But we're in that space. And it's important because I think this is an under-loved space, and I think we have the opportunity of building GOAU to $10 billion in assets.

Next, please. So the big picture is really to look at this century. And this century, we have seen gold outperform the S&P 500. Well, why is that? Well, this century with the World Trade Organization was created in the '90s, China comes in 2002 and the whole world starts to take off after the crisis that we had with a tech bubble in 2000, where many tech stocks are trading at lofty values per revenue, per share, and they never -- 50x revenue per share. All they have were eyeballs, no cash flow revenue, everything cater, but the Internet continue to grow and prosper and we bring in a new way.

But during that whole cycle is this concept of modern monetary theory. And the theory is that we can print our way out of this. And then when the economy turns, we'll buy back the debt and shrink it. Well, they just don't do it. And each major crisis means that it will be more than twice the amount of money for the last crisis. And so if you have the G20 countries, that's all you have to follow, and we believe that monetary and fiscal policies are precursor to change. In fact, we put it in all of our prospectuses and that we track and monitor this to give us an idea from a macro thematic point of view.

Well, it's not going away. And what's changed as we saw with the World Economic Forum with Trump and the executives team he had over there, is that used to be with the World Trade Organization, the greatest theme was, first and foremost, was trade, global trade, and it worked. It brought so many people out of poverty and it helped China and India have accelerated GDPs per capita. It was a phenomenal exercise. But things started to morph and change after 2018, and I'll walk you through why that happened. But there was a change taking place.

And so the gold theme didn't go away because the money printing continued for trade and helping with social causes everywhere and experiments everywhere in the world with money. The amount of money that the U.S. government was given to all these NGOs. I even had a friend that has an NGO of Canada, and he was upset because he wasn't going to get the $9 million a year from the U.S. funding. And it amazed me that we were giving money to NGOs and other countries to go and do causes, and that's all changed now. And it's changed because the priority was first trade, then national security. And then open borders, that whole concept that didn't bother people because it wasn't a top priority to many of the United Nations and Europe, et cetera. Well, it's now flipped.

So what's #1 priority is security, then trade. And that was very evident with Trump and his Chief of Staff and Chief of Commerce, Chief of Trade, Chief of State, all speaking at the World Economic Forum and NATO. And so it's recognizing that the government is going to continue to spend money, raise money, debt funding, but it's going to go into national security and sovereign issues. So that means follow the money is a little actually easier to follow what industries are going to really benefit from this. But it's not going away.

Next, please. So when you look at the gold bugs when I first got in this business in 1978, and one of the big parts was what's the total debt. So I used to when I got the first in the business, if we go to the far right, what's the total federal debt, and it's $38 trillion, and you take the $38 trillion and you divide it by 8 billion ounces of gold that are above the ground that are known for jewelry, known as security for companies and security for central banks, et cetera. So gold is now $5,500. So based on only $38 trillion in debt, gold has reached this target. I've always used that as a good proxy for where it's going, but then I'd like to take a look at the arbitrage, what is the total U.S. debt. And so if you look at the total U.S. debt, it's about $110 trillion. Now you divide that by 8 billion ounces. So gold could go to $13,000 over the next 5, 10 years, and the base looks like it's around $4,700. And so we still see that pressure going higher.

So now we talk about the rest of the world. Well, China wants to dethrow the U.S. dollar. And they have -- when they -- Xi Jinping, it's really changed since 2018 when he became dictator for life, and he's done several things that are very significant, and he goes and focuses on just the U.S. debt scenario. But really, when you look at China, they have more debt as a whole. And so it's a bit as a percentage of their GDP, they're more leveraged than us overall. But the real attack is to dethrow the U.S. dollar for global trade. And the missiles have been attacking us in every form and fashion.

So one of those parts was to trade oil was Saudi Arabia and they said, they wanted to -- China wanted to take Chinese yuan. And Saudi Arabia told them 5 years ago, no, they have to own more gold. So they've been steadily buying more gold. They could buy all the gold in the world mine right now for the next 8 years, and they still would just barely get relative to where Fort Knox is. So they're going to be an important dent in that overall bid for gold. And so we still -- the difference is that these other countries, they carry the gold mark-to-market. We carry the gold at $35 an ounce. And we went to market to market, our debt to equity to gold, et cetera, would go through a big change. And maybe under the Trump administration, that would happen. But that would still create more pressure, I think, for gold to trade higher and the valuation of gold would be higher.

So I'd like to take a look at, okay, here's the U.S. Now let's look at the rest of the world. And when we look at the rest of the world and you say global M2 supply, well, that is -- a well-known analyst used to always use this as a forecasting tool, and that would be $120 trillion divided by 8 billion ounces. Now we're talking about $15,000 an ounce of gold. And then if you take a look at all the global debt in the world and all the members of the United Nations, and you put that together divided by 8 billion ounces of gold, gold is $43,000. So gold is a very attractive asset. It's not overvalued. I'm asked, is it overvalued when it hit $4,500? And I said no. And I'm going to explain to you, this is one of the reasons why and why GROW is uniquely positioned to participate in this reengineering of investors to all of a sudden buy more gold and gold stocks.

Next, please. So gold continues to reach all-time highs. Next, please. But more important, it's more than doubled the S&P this century. And I tell this -- I give this slide out all the time and people actually don't believe it. And I've always advocated for 35 years, the 10% golden rule, you should have 10% in gold and gold stocks and rebalance every year, and you would have outperformed overall markets. It's been -- and we're seeing more and more asset allocators come in to wanted to have gold and gold stocks. So this is a classic example that gold has been a great diversifier.

Next, please. Ray Dalio believes that a well diversified portfolio should have 10% to 15% in gold and so you got to remember, he's over $150 billion, the largest hedge fund in the world and very popular author and videos and movies that are free, very educational on the global scene, a Ted talk speaker. So Ray Dalio, who I met in 1970 -- 1980, 1981 in that period, I met at the [ Contrarian ] Forum in Vermont in the fall at a fund management conference. And so I'm really aging myself now, but I think it's really been helpful to put this in context what Ray Dalio believes having gold as social investors.

Next, please. But here is a very compelling visual. And one of the ideas that I saw before is you take the U.S. ETF market and you take all the gold ETFs you divide them in and you say what percentage are gold related. And you can see that gold in 2010, 2012 is when Xi Jinping, the leader of the Communist Party and dictator in China came to power. And then by 2018, he cements himself as dictator for life and really becomes a Mao type of communist party person, and he has some strategies to control the world and to dethrow in the U.S. dollar. What we saw in America was a deinvestment in gold, even though gold continued to outperform. It was so frustrating for me to explain which I've shared with you earlier, and there was one group that would be buying these RIAs and tell them they weren't allowed to own individual stocks, only ETFs and never gold.

So I've told now that they've just finally gone into gold and they missed this whole part. And we used to have one that had, I think, $20 million in our gold funds, and they had to redeem because the new owner did not believe in gold as an asset class. But I think we're going to see this mean reversion take place that gold is going to end up being back to 8% in gold stocks, 8% of all ETFs. So I believe the wind is at our sail, and it makes me very comfortable with where GROW is positioned for this move.

Next, please. So silver reached an all-time high. I get more calls and interest on silver. Silver has gone through in copper, both of them have been where the spot price has been basically more expensive to get physical delivery than what the futures price was saying. It's very weird and the supply of gold has really been going through the inventory. And I kept saying that once that happens for more than a year that we're going to have this big explosive move, and we have. It's been a phenomenal move in silver. But there's things that inflection points that happened in capital markets that change. So we saw silver climbing with gold. And it was having this nice price appreciation and you see everyone start publishing their gold-to-silver ratios and this and that and why silver. And I was a big believer that silver is an important component for other factors.

But what really made it take off besides the speculation came into it, but silver officially was added to the list of critical minerals, under the Trump administration, that was a game changer because we've seen that the government has been investing. And the government itself since World War II has had silver as a strategic stockpile because they know they need silver for weaponry and the same thing in Japan and the same thing in China. So I said to you earlier that there was a huge shift in Trump going from top priority was trade to #2 with top priority is national security and sovereign security. And we see things like silver being critical minerals. All of a sudden, there's a new wave of institutional buying silver. And you see a short squeeze going on, and then you see highly leveraged players jumping in for the speculation.

It has this incredible run and then it has a 40% drop in 1 day because the futures, which were leveraged at the beginning this year -- a year ago was like 10:1 leverage, and they basically removed the leverage to do everything to try to slow down the correction. And I think a bunch of stop losses got hit. And then we had in January, what's really important for investors to recognize for silver was the unwinding of the Japanese carry trade, and that was approximately about $500 billion because the Japanese yen yields were rising and a lot of hedge funds have borrowed and cheap yen and reinvested in U.S. assets, a lot of leverage like silver. And all of a sudden, now they had to unwind. And it all happened at the same time, and that was a normal probably healthy correction. Gold has rebounded. Silver will slowly climb from its lows on that correction. But I remain very bullish on the asset class. And I share with you, don't put all your jump all in, but buy -- have cash to buy in the down days.

Next, please. So thematic trends, capturing exposure through our funds. GOAU is focused on royalty and streaming. It's a more conservative path of looking at the space. And now it's becoming where there's an active ETF for us, it's going to have a greater tilt to growth and momentum in revenue and cash flow that's driving that royalty. Senior mining companies, that would be [indiscernible], longest data points. It was the first no low gold mutual fund in the world, long, long history. And then USLUX and connecting the dots, I learned about Bitcoin because of my knowledge of gold. And I learned about data centers because of Bitcoin is in data centers. And then I learned about the idea of creating a war ETF. But in that journey, I learned that 60% of all gold demand is love and it's predominantly of Asia and the Middle East that buy and give gold for weddings, for birthdays, for religious holidays. There's a huge drive for it. And it's highly correlate to rising GDP per capita of other nations that have this cultural affinity.

And so 40% is fear. And what China has done is ignited that fear element, which has been pushing up on the gold and use [ OREX ] is in the senior gold producers only. What I also noticed in what they call the K economy today is that luxury goods, what I saw in places in Dubai, going to Singapore, just the tremendous growth in high net worth people, how the smarter luxury companies were creating a scarcity. You can go to Hermes store and you can see a Birkin bag in the window, but you can't buy unless you're on the President's list and you can only buy 2 a year. Very few get on that list. They're mainly sold out and they're used -- they're bought by the 1% of the world's population. They buy them and store them as like people buy art. You got a new Warhol back in the day with Warhol print that came out of Mao $1,000 each year was a different color face of Mao. They went to $50,000.

And so you're seeing this happen with cars. You're seeing that power companies turned around, and we saw that with Rolls-Royce experience, Bentley, even the Porsche has done it. And we know that Ferrari is the best masters of the universe of only producing so many cars at each year raising the price. So they become collectors' items. And so the Birkin bag is a collector's item. If you can get one at the store and the open market, it's worth 3x more. It's recognizing this sort of thought process as a business model, and that's where luxury goods is. And it's the only real fund that's out there. 10% is in quality gold stocks and has far outperformed any of its peers.

Next, please. So back to Ray Dalio, capital war fears. The monetary order is breaking down. He says, that's why for gold. Next, please. And a lot of that is the fear element. This is to give you an idea of the Russian Arctic installations as the climate change has taken place and there's been melting of ice. Russia has built 40 icebreakers, of which I think 10 are nuclear. China, out of nowhere says, oh, we're near the Arctic and we own the Arctic too, and they built 5 icebreakers. They have more icebreakers than America or Canada. So now there's a big push in Canada and U.S. to build more icebreakers because we have to protect because China was trying to buy a World War II military bases in Greenland, and that's a great concern while Russia basically created all these missile places and launches.

Next, please. That fear trade shows up in gold. Next slide, please. So Greenland, I honestly disappointed the President Trump. I think he takes his presentations and runs it through open shot and takes them down to Grade 3 to talk to the masses. But the whole theory in Greenland really is about strategic missiles coming across and the early warning system on the DEW line in Northern Canada and Greenland is key to stopping America from getting wiped out by Russian ballistic missiles. And so the idea of Greenland with only 57,000 people really changed when China showed up with billions of dollars to build 4 big airports for military planes. Why would they do that? So this sort of storytelling gets out there, and we're seeing central banks now becoming worried and they're buying more gold.

Next, please. This gives you an idea of the military basis and shipping groups around the Arctic circle. They call this the Ice Arctic Silk Road. But it is become a serious issue. I think in 2018, Russia sent to the bottom of where the Arctic circle is. It was on the Canadian side and said it's their -- they sent a water aqua drone down to the bottom and plant the Russian flag. I mean these are sort of [ martial ] type of activities by Putin and Xi Jinping, and that greatly concerns the State Department.

Next, please. So China's BR. I thought this was a great idea. It was a romantic idea of [indiscernible] that's the silk road between China over to Turkey and opened up for trade and China would bring through how to make railways through difficult areas, et cetera. But really all along for Xi Jinping, it's been a Trojan horse. Can I get into your economy, and it was originally 12 countries. Next, please. And now it's grown to 150 countries. So I really want to know how many countries in the United Nations is 193. So that means China has lent to 75% of the UN is influenced by China. It's $1.3 trillion to 150 of the 193 countries that represent the United Nations, they are having a big influence. And they are saying that you can't trade in dollars and so people have to trade at [indiscernible], then they have to go find a currency, a bank that converts that into dollars to buy anything from America. It's just this assault. So they weaponize one belt one road into one belt one road of communism around the world.

We've seen democracy fall to an all-time low. You see on this map of Australia, what Darwin is. Well, Darwin is one of the biggest ports for exporting iron ore and it's also where the biggest [indiscernible] for moving information to Singapore. Strangely enough, the Chinese bought this 10 years ago, the government from -- the government paid $500 million but Australia has done a [ 180 ] on that because they did military excursions all around the island of Australia showing their aircraft carrier and their weaponry. And Australia said, okay, we can't trust them, and we're buying back the port and China try to block it, but it's going to happen as I was at an event in Harvard 2 weeks ago, and it was all about, Rudd spoke, the former Prime Minister, and that's going to take place. So that tension shows up in the world of gold. The money printing shows up in gold. So it's important for investors why I believe as we're comfortable we're in a secular bull market in gold.

Next, please. So these are some of the companies in our war ETF, innovative and RTX, Raytheon. You can see the great charts. Next, please. So we found this product is understanding where money flows because the budget of the government is pretty straightforward. We're going to go and spend $1 trillion. And of that, half of it is going to be for health care and salaries of the military. Now we left with $500 billion of that $500 billion. This as much is going to go for tanks. This is for aircraft. This is going to go for cybersecurity. It's pretty easy to figure out now. So which companies get the contracts and have the strongest revenue momentum, they're the best performing stocks. And you can do data analysis going back. So I want to share with you that I think that cybersecurity is 28% is coming down. Semiconductor is okay, but we're basically looking at these thematics and recognizing why they're so important for battle.

Next, please. Because the priorities of the world have changed. And this is a classic example that when [ Noriega ] was captured in 1989, many American soldiers were killed. None were killed on the last attack of going in and getting [indiscernible]. And if you look at the next visual, and I can explain to you connecting the dots.

Next, please. There's the hyperlink between military aircraft with which you can see in the bottom left-hand side, this is NVIDIA's super cluster chips. And that hyperlink is so important with the aircraft, with the aircraft carrier and along with satellites and space, that movement and flow is how they were able to go in with a minimum amount of anyone being wounded. So this is a growth cycle, and that's what I learned regarding HIVE is that HIVE is in the data center business. It's building Tier 1, Tier 3 data centers, Tier 3 data centers are for high-performance computing, AI, and it's only a growth cycle. There's a shortage of manufactured parts to make these data centers, but the demand is huge. You just think of it being people like you want to use open chat and Grok. Now it's bigger than that because the U.S. military is trying to buy as many data centers as get contracts. They don't want to own the data center. They want just a contract. You have H100, 200 chips there, and they're going into contracts that last a good period of time.

Next, please. So now I'm going to turn it over to Lisa. I've been very long-winded. I apologize. I'm sorry, but I really want to try to paint a picture that I'm so enthusiastic that the wind is hit on our sail. Gold has much more upside. There's many factors for that, and that led to the creation of a new product called war. It's the application of AI as America rebuilds all of its military and drones. So there's going to be much more money going into that, and we will capture that in war with an active ETF. Last year, the market was up about 12%, and our war was up 24%. So it's doing a great job. I'm very thrilled about it. And gold, it has much more on the upside.

So thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Now I'll turn it over to Lisa Callicotte, CFO.

Thank you, Frank. Good morning. On the next slide, I'll start with kind of an overview of our financial highlights. Average assets under management were $1.48 billion, and our operating revenues were $2.5 million. Pretax income was $535,000.

We move on to the next slide. This talks about the breakout of our earnings. We have operational earnings, which is made up of our advisory services. And then we have other earnings, and this is mainly made up of realized and unrealized gains and losses on our investments. Both our advisory earnings and our investment gains and losses fluctuate based on market forces.

As we travel to the next slide, we'll get into more details of our financial statements for the quarter. Our total operating revenues was $2.5 million for the quarter. This is an increase of $279,000 or 13% from the $2.2 million in the same quarter last year. The increase is primarily due to increases in the US GIF assets under management, especially in our equity mutual funds. And this was partially offset by a decrease in our Jets ETF assets under management. Operating expenses for the current quarter were $2.6 million, a decrease of $172,000 or 6%, primarily due to decreases in general and administrative expenses of $207,000 or 15%, mainly due to lower ETF-related costs and was partially offset by an increase in employee compensation benefits of $45,000 or 4%, mainly due to higher bonuses based on performance.

On the next slide, you can see our operating loss for the quarter was $88,000, but it was a favorable change of $451,000 compared to the same quarter for fiscal year 2025. Other income increased $200,000 compared to prior year, mainly due to unrealized gains and losses on investment securities in the current year being $28,000 compared to unrealized losses in the prior year of $221,000, resulting in a favorable change of $249,000. Realized foreign currency gains were $57,000 compared to losses of $239,000, again, another favorable change of $296,000. But these changes were partially offset by lower interest and realized gains due to principal payments on the HIVE convertible debenture.

Net loss after taxes for the quarter was $846,000 or a loss of $0.07 per share, which is an unfavorable change of $760,000 compared to net loss of $86,000 or $0.01 per share in the same quarter of fiscal year 2025. But this net loss was due to a tax adjustment of approximately $1.3 million related to the tax treatment of certain securities. The company has filed a tax accounting method change with the IRS related to those securities, and we expect to record an offsetting benefit in the quarter ending March 31, 2026. The net tax expense related to the method change is expected to be 0 for the fiscal year. But due to GAAP reporting requirements, we recorded an expense in the quarter ending December 31, 2025, and then expect to record an offsetting benefit for the quarter ending March 31, 2026.

Moving to the next slide. We see we have a strong balance sheet, includes high levels of cash and securities. Cash and cash equivalents was approximately $25.2 million at December 31, 2025, an increase of approximately $675,000 or 3% since June 2025. Current investments totaled $9.2 million. On the next slide, we see our other assets and the total of all the investments included in other assets is approximately $6.5 million. On the next slide, you see our liabilities. They did increase from June 30, 2025, by approximately $193,000. And on the next slide, you can see our stockholders' equity detail. And at December 31, 2025, our company had a net working capital of $36.7 million and a current ratio of 19.4:1.

With that, I will pass it over to Holly to discuss marketing and distribution.

Thank you, Lisa. All right. On the next slide, this highlights our commitment to delivering timely original market insights through YouTube and TikTok, which both are powerful platforms for engaging both new and long-time shareholders. Some of the recent highlights include our popular videos on gold, what's driving it and what could come next, along with 2 global market updates featuring retired Lieutenant General, John Evans, who shared valuable geopolitical insights with us just recently. So if you have not seen those, we encourage you to visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay current with our latest content.

On the next slide, I'd like to spotlight several recent interviews featuring Frank Holmes from the past quarter, including appearances on Money Metals Exchange, PreMarket Prep, which streams live on YouTube and X. We have Investing News Network and finally, Financial Fox. And all of these can be found on their respective websites or channels, but also we share them across our social media channels as well.

All right. Moving to the next slide. You can see here that it's our updated 2025 periodic table of commodity returns. So this is one of our most popular annual pieces, and it is fully interactive on our website. So you can click on any individual commodity to track its highs and lows over time, making it an engaging way to visualize the leaders and laggards. It also offers helpful perspective on what drove results last year and which areas may be poised for a correction or a rebound this year in 2026.

All right. On the next slide, we always like to recap the most read Frank Talk blog post during the recent quarter. So as you can see here, the top theme that remained in focus for another quarter was gold for sure. We hosted a webcast at the start of the year also about a month ago, covering precious metals and the commodity space and commodity moves are definitely another area of the market where investors are focused and really paying attention to.

All right. Finally, on my last slide, I want to encourage you all to follow U.S. Global on social media. We're on X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. So wherever you prefer to get your news, be sure to check us out. That way, you're up to date on everything that's going on.

All right. As a reminder to our audience, if you have any questions today, please e-mail us to [email protected], and we will gladly follow up with you to get anything clarified that you may need more information on. Thank you so much for tuning in today.

[Audio Gap]

On the next slide, 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.

On the next slide, 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 subjects 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 the next slide, as always, we appreciate our loyal shareholders. If you'd like one of our signature hats, please e-mail us at [email protected] with your mailing address, and we would be happy to send some your way. All right. Now on to Slide #5. I will briefly review our company.

U.S. Global Investors is an innovative investment manager with vast experience in global markets and specialized sectors. We use quantamental strategy to create thematic smart beta 2.0 products. The company was originally founded as an investment club, becoming a registered investment adviser in 1968 and has a long-standing history of global investing and launching first-of-their-kind products, including the first no-load gold fund.

Finally, we are experts in thematic investing, in particular, gold and precious metals, natural resources, airlines and luxury goods, all using a quantamental approach that includes both macro and micro factors.

On the next slide, we often begin our presentations with this visual called the DNA of volatility. It serves as a useful reminder to shareholders that market ups and downs are a normal part of long-term behavior with assets.

With that, I'd like to turn it over to our CEO and CIO, Frank Holmes, to dive into this quarter's earnings. Frank?

Thank you, Holly. On the DNA of volatility, I think the visual is really important because it highlights what's a nonevent and I shared with you 20 years ago, gold was much more volatile on a daily basis. It was 2 to 3x for the S&P and over 10 days, it was like 6%, 7%. Now it's changed. And asset classes like GLD, all of a sudden, more funds institutions going into it, they start to morph and change the DNA of volatility. Tesla used to have the highest volatility until it became a component of the S&P 500. So, it's recognizing, and we update this every quarter for investors to recognize what is that volatility.

U.S. Global's volatility, a lot had to do with gold and gold stocks because that's a big part of our asset class composition. And you can see how it compares. It's a nonevent for gold to be up or down 1%, grow to be up or down 2% on a daily basis. And the Dow Jones U.S. Asset Managers Index is also 2%. But over 10 days, other factors all of a sudden seem to have a bigger impact on larger asset classes of asset managers. But it's important for you to recognize different asset classes have different DNAs of volatility, and this all helps you to manage the expectations. Next, please.

Top institutional shareholders, 6.28% is Gator Capital Management, 5.68% is Vanguard and 4.81% is Perritt. Thank you for being long-term investors. Gator is new, and Perritt Capital Asset Management has been a long-term investor in microcaps with a unique expertise in this space. So, thank you all. And next, please.

As the CEO, I own approximately 19% of the company and approximately 99% of the voting control. A lot of that voting control has to do with rules of the '40 Act, which you can always -- if you need more information on that, you can inquire and we'll get them for you. Next, please.

But in that context, we still have 3 independent directors at U.S. Global, one with a law degree, others with a steep knowledge of the capital markets and in addition to mutual funds and ETFs. So, it's a good long-term Board. We now have 4 independent directors, correct me on that. Bobby Duncan brings unique experience as a Board member and that knows everything about this industry. So now I'd like to talk about strategy and tactics.

We love this idea of creating thematic products that are sustainable using smart beta 2.0 strategy, which requires rigorous back testing for thousands of hours. And it's also you have to continuously do it. It's really -- it's an active money management process, but it's rules based around these smart beta factors that you look at in portfolio construction. And our mission is to make people feel financially happy and secure that their wealth is growing with our products. And strategically, as a company, U.S. Global has been buying back the stock using an algorithm on flat and down days.

And we managed to preserve our cash for future growth and opportunities to from any type of market corrections and M&A activity to acquire fund groups. We've been busy growing our subscriber base and followers and increasing our exposure has really been to the Bitcoin ecosystem by making certain investments like we've had HIVE, who's been paying us back our 8% coupon, and we've been redeploying it in other sort of unique products that are out there that are also throwing off a yield. So next, please.

We believe that buying back our stock because stock is undervalued, and therefore, we buy back shares of GROW when the price is flattened down from the previous trading day using a simple algorithm. This is part of the company's 2-pillar strategy to enhance shareholder value by paying the dividend as well as buying back the stock. Next, please.

Current share repurchase program for the end of September, we repurchased 159,074 Class A shares using approximately $400,000. As the stock rallied through the quarter, we end up buying less stock because there's less days it was down. Next, please.

This is a visual showing just the tremendous volatility we have experienced last quarter. Last year, this time was the quarter end for the election. Then we had March and June. There was just tremendous volatility, especially after April 2, that's impacted the funds, but they seem to have, I would say, have stability in certain asset classes, particularly gold related are improving. Next, please.

The company has paid a monthly dividend since June 2007. Current yield at the share price of $2.60 is 3.46%. Next, please. What's important is an investment group and a thesis I've called the shareholder yield, which is a combination of dividends, buybacks and debt reduction. So, our -- we don't have any debt. So, from that end, our market cap is really makes it an attractive investment. So, the next visual is going to show you that when you do stock buybacks and dividends, our overall shareholder yield is much higher than a 5-year bond.

This is a another visual showing you relative valuations on price to book were very attractive. On a P/E ratio, we have a much higher P/E ratio. I think that relates a lot to the gold assets. And the first couple of quarters this year were impacted by the election and the tariff battles. And so I think that hopefully, that the worst is behind us as we move forward going into next year. Next, please.

So, this is a visual that relates to the previous thing about shareholder yield. 5-year yield is 3.74%. That's roughly what our dividend is. The 10-year is 4.16%. And with our dividends plus buying back stock for investors long term, it's at 8.32% shareholder yield. So, I think it's just nice and conservative methodology of managing our capital. Next, please.

Average assets under management in billions of dollars from a year ago. They're slightly down. They were down 6 months ago more so, and they've had a rebound, which is important. And it's interesting, launching new products, the challenges of getting the story told even though you've got good fund performance and you have a unique asset class, it's just becoming more expensive and challenging. And to me, it's really quite fascinating the apathy that's taken place in some of the products that we noticed that even the gold last year, the biggest gold ETFs in equity had redemptions and so did the bullion. And it wasn't until this past quarter that you saw a big surge going into the GLD and into the gold equities as gold soared to over $4,200 an all-time high.

It really is -- I've never experienced where gold makes an all-time high, and you don't have the substantial flows into gold equities as if there's something else happening in the capital markets and so I'm told that some of the prop tests are behind this, but I really don't know as of yet. All I know is that we're still focused on what we're doing and really providing unique products. Next, please.

This is the quarterly earnings. The impact of the tariff war, you can see, did impact us, and we've had a bit of a rebound. Assets are up and also our investment income has improved. So that's also helped us turning this corner. Next, please.

Gross investment in HIVE, it's 8% convertible. There's about $842,000 of the original $15 million, which will get paid back over the next 6 months. Next, please. $2.60 a share at the end of September, $1.4 billion assets under management and $2.25 million operating revenue for the quarter. Next, please.

A look at '26, company has steady cash flow despite volatile and challenging macro market conditions. We continue to have a strong balance sheet, which includes both cash and other investments, and the company continues to buy back stock on flat or down days and pay a monthly dividend. Next, please.

Our Quantamental investment strategy combines cutting-edge technology with robust data analysis to help optimize returns and manage risk effectively for our shareholders. We believe that this smart beta 2.0 factors on our thematic lineup as it sets us apart from our competition. Next, please.

So, here's sort of a lineup. I think it's important to see that the gold funds have had a huge bounce in this past year. And the juniors still have not taken off even though there's a great rebound. Luxury has done well relative to discretionary -- consumer discretionary indexes. It's also probably because it has a unique exposure to gold momentum stocks. Resource and commodities and I think it's really important for investors that this has far outperformed 1, 3 and 5 years.

And I think that Ray Dalio not only recommends 10% to 15% in gold and gold stocks, he's also in resources. And Global Resources has outperformed its benchmark. And it's just a unique product, and it's done a great job in performance this year. Jets was doing well until we started the shutdown and now we have another sort of calamity that's happening in sentiment that the TSA number of the top 40 airports and business activity are shrinking by 10%. So, there's longer lineups, and that affects the sentiment of the airline industry in America.

But I can share with you, it's booming in Europe and in Asia. And you can see the travel industry ETF listed on the London Stock Exchange. It's up 8.5%. So, I think historically, this fourth quarter has been a huge win for the airline industry in America, except for when you have a government shutdown and it impacts TSA workers coming to show up and how fast people can make their connections, et cetera.

But I come back that when this is over, that I think you'll have a big pop here. Global shipping is a real surprise that all the tariff wars has sold off and then has had a rebound. Shipping rates are up and they're remaining strong. And I think we'll also see robust dividends being paid by shipping. This is unique because 80% of all cargo in the world is by the ocean. And this basically, this product captures the world's global trade. So, if you want to look at something that's really real-time capturing GDP of the world, I believe that sea is a key factor. If it slows down GDP, it's because shipping between exporting countries and importing countries has declined.

And right now, it's pretty strong. AI defense is our latest product called War. It's AI applications being applied to various industries that are so key to rebuilding our military. And what a lot of people don't realize is since Xi Jinping has been the dictator of China and taken on the responsibilities and the power of authority of Mao, he has tripled the Navy. He has tripled military spending. And so, we're seeing now a big spend in America and in Europe, which only gets exasperated in Europe with Putin a battle in Ukraine of a great concern that we have to use the latest of technology to rebuild our military. So, it's done a great job in the first 9 months of being launched. And the gold royalties and streamers, they're plus 92%. So, we're very happy that they're doing what the model suggested they would do. Next, please.

Fund assets, as you can see, these assets a year ago were negative, and now we're seeing a rebound for this third quarter. And so that's important for overall revenue. The mutual funds do have a higher revenue basis points than the ETF. So, seeing Global Resources and World and Gold shares, which was the first mutual fund, no-load mutual fund that they're rebounding. Next, please.

Gold reaches all-time high, hits 4,300 and has gone through a correction since October, but still it remains on tact. It had an extremely overbought condition. It's just normal for it to go through this correction. I remain very bullish. I'll explain to you in a few seconds why. Next, please.

This here is that gold has outperformed the S&P 500 and shocked so many investors that this century, gold has basically doubled what the S&P has done. And it's really important that Ray Dalio, the largest hedge fund, having a 10% to 15% in gold and gold stocks really has helped his overall investing and investors not invest in this sector. It's -- I was showing a visual are actually pretty well close to the all-time low of the apathy of ignoring the spectacular diversifier for a diversified portfolio. Next, please.

Ray Dalio says you 10% to 15% in gold. Next, please, and another 25% in natural resources. So, we feel that we're in the right category. But here's what's really important to look at the national debt of the U.S. is at $48 trillion, and that's concerning so many countries. But it's really the rest of the world other than a debt frenzy in the next place, next visual, there's so much criticism of America, especially by Americans. And I understand about accountability for money being spent. But when we look at the rest of the world, it's $338 trillion, and it's more than 3x the global GDP.

So, I think that this concept of modern monetary theory this century has only led to gold where you're seeing debt -- total global debt rising faster than global GDP, and that just means resource assets, especially gold, very attractive as a diversifier. Next, please.

And I'm not seeing any big changes. There's so many different sources of data. You can use the IMF or this is the Bank of International settlements and there's other data metrics. But it's roughly trying to share with you that the debt -- the U.S. debt now is amongst the world's highest. It's 249%. But look at China, it's 292%. And then you look at Japan, it's 380%. And Hong Kong is probably a better reflection of the high debt to equity and GDP because China masks a lot between the interstate debts, et cetera, is many believe that's well over 350%.

But just using the Bank of International settlements, you can see that the rest of the world is printing money and the debt levels are very high, and this only bodes well for gold in a scarcity factor. Next, please.

GOAU has significantly outperformed the market, and we're happy to show you this, and we still advocate the 10% golden rule that a diversified portfolio should have 10% as Ray Dalio is 10% to 15%. Next, please.

This is a standard disclaimer when you give performance numbers. Next, please. World Precious Minerals, it has a junior exposure to it. So, it has a higher number and mid-cap gold producers than GOAU, which is more big cap and royalty companies, but it's also GOAU is less volatile in the corrections. Next, please.

As another disclaimer that's necessary for when showing performance. Next, please. The implied -- this is to me really profound for investors that back in 2010, 2012, when Xi Jinping became the Imperial leader of Communist China, the investors in America were about 8% in gold equity and gold bullion ETFs, and it's declined to 2%. And it just seems to be starting to rise. So, I think that by the time it gets back to 8%, we're going to probably see gold at $7,000 and the gold equities at another level. Gold property margins are showing up spectacular. Our investor alert is covering that today. I'm showing you this past quarter that Q-over-Q and year-over-year, many of the gold stocks are just ripping in cash flow and performance, and they're now showing up in IBD as growth momentum stocks. Next, please.

So, this is a product we have. It's jets in Europe, but it also has a bigger focus on cruise lines and airports, but also bigger exposure to luxury hotels and hotel chains, which have really become oligopolies when you look around the world. And they're still showing great numbers and performance this year. And British Airlines as a stock -- individual stock is on a 45-degree rise from left to right. So, I remain very bullish on global airlines. Next, please.

The other big theme that seems to rocket in Barrons and front cover and IBD is the AI market exploding. It's true it is, and we remain very bullish on the sector, and this is a complements war ETF. Next, please.

So, the aerospace and defense AI to rebuild the military. These are the 5 major industries that make up this new smart beta 2.0 ETF. Next, please. And I ask this question often, and most people don't realize that 80% of the world's cargo is carried by shipping, and it's the best way to have your fingers on the arteries and veins of global economic activity. That's with CEA ATF captures. Next, please.

Recently, we're greatly concerned about a drop in democracy around the world. It's at an all-time low, something like 25% of the world's population now is run really as of democracies. And a lot of even the United Nations has gone to authoritarian and some forms of authoritarian regimes. And so Keystone is ranked the #1 school in San Antonio year in, year out, and they have a very strong model UN and they have the most grads from the school here going to Ivy League or Stanford.

And so, we want to get behind investing in the future of America, investing in model UN where democracy and capitalism are very strong and powerful pillars for innovation and sustainable growth. Next, please.

I'd like to turn over to hard-working, our CFO, Lisa Callicotte.

Thank you, Frank. Good morning. First, I'll start with our financial highlights on the next slide. You can see that our quarterly average assets under management were $1.4 billion and operating revenues were $2.25 million and net income was $1.5 million.

The next slide is a reminder of the different components of our earnings. We have operational earnings that consist of our advisory fees, and we have other earnings, which mainly consists of both realized and unrealized gains and losses on our investment holdings. Our operational earnings are based on our average assets under management for the period, and our investment earnings are based on the change in market value of the investments held.

The next slide provides more detail of our operations for the period ending September 30, 2025. We see our quarterly operating revenues were $2.3 million for the quarter, which was an increase of $94,000 or 4% from the $2.2 million the same quarter last year. The increase is primarily due to increases in advisory and administrative fees for our equity mutual funds, and it was somewhat offset by a decrease in ETF fees.

As you can see, operating expenses increased $50,000 or 2%, mainly due to employee compensation increasing $101,000 or 9%, reflecting higher bonuses and advertising expenses increasing $52,000 or 48% related to expanded ETF marketing efforts. And these were partially offset by a decrease of $93,000 in our general and administrative expenses, primarily due to lower ETF and travel costs.

The next slide, we see our operating loss for the quarter ending September 30, 2025, it's $515,000 compared to the operating loss of $559,000 the same quarter last year. Other income for the quarter was $2.4 million compared to other income of $995,000 in the prior year. The change is $1.4 million and was primarily due to higher net investment income in the current period due to unrealized gains on other investments.

Net income after taxes for the quarter is $1.5 million or $0.12 per share. This is an increase of $1.2 million compared to the net income of $315,000 or $0.02 per share in the same quarter for last fiscal year.

Moving to the next page. We see we have a strong balance sheet, includes high levels of cash and investments. Cash and cash equivalents was approximately $24.6 million at September 30, 2025, and it increased approximately $34,000 since June 2025. Current investments totaled $9.7 million.

On the next slide, this is a detail of our other assets. And the total of all the investments in other assets is approximately $7.5 million. The following slide shows that our liability slightly increased from June 30, 2025. And on the following slide, we see our stockholder equity detail. At September 30, 2025, the company had net operating working capital of $37.2 million and a current ratio of 20.5:1.

With that, I'll turn it over to Holly.

Thank you, Lisa. All right. For the first slide in my section, this slide highlights our continued commitment to providing original and timely marketing insight through our YouTube channel. Video remains one of our most effective ways to educate and engage both new and long-time shareholders. And as you can see on this slide, our recent features include Frank's gold price forecast where he accurately predicted $4,000 an ounce gold, as well as his latest outlook moving forward. And another notable video, Gold's next move is a replay of our recent fireside chat with some of the industry's leading experts. So, we definitely encourage everyone to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay informed whenever new content is released.

Okay. On the next slide, I'd like to spotlight several recent interviews that Frank Holmes has done in the past quarter. This includes appearances on the Daniela Cambone Show with ITM Trading, PreMarket Prep, which streams live on YouTube and X, proactive investors. And finally, one of Frank's recent blog articles was featured in Real Assets Advisor Magazine. And all of these can be found on their respective websites, but they are also shared on our social media channels.

All right. On the next slide, we currently have 2 exceptional white papers that are available for our shareholders and other investors. One of them focuses on the defense and AI sectors, while the other provides an in-depth analysis of the distinctive business model of gold royalty and streaming companies. These white papers serve as valuable educational resources for our shareholders, and they've also helped expand our subscriber base as new readers provide their information to access the content. And both of these are available for download at usglobaletfs.com.

On to the next slide, we always like to recap the most read Frank Talk blog post during the recent quarter. So, as you can see here, the top theme that remained in focus was absolutely gold, gold miners and the price of gold. And in addition to that, people are still very curious about airports and investing in the global aviation space. So, if you're not already a Frank Talk subscriber, it's free to do so, and you can do that on our website.

Okay. On the next slide, which is my last slide, I just want to encourage everyone to follow us on social media. We're on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. So, wherever you prefer to get your news, be sure to check us out this way, we're up to date with what's going on, not only with GROW stock, our funds, but also just broader market insights.

Okay. On the last slide, just a friendly reminder to our audience. If you have questions today, please e-mail those to [email protected], and we will gladly follow up with you to get anything clarified that you might need some more information on. Thank you so much for tuning in today. That concludes our webcast summarizing the first quarter of 2026.