Good morning, and thank you, for joining us today for our webcast announcing U.S. Global Investors’ results for the Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2019. I’m Holly Schoenfeldt. If you have any questions during the webcast, you can enter them in the questions area of the control panel side bar, which is normally to the right of your screen. Also, you may download a PDF of today’s slides by clicking on the red handout button. The presenters for today’s program are Frank Holmes, U.S. Global Investors CEO and Chief Investment Officer; Lisa Callicotte, Chief Financial Officer; and myself, Holly Schoenfeldt, Marketing and Public Relations Manager. During this webcast, we may make forward-looking statements about our relative business outlook. Any forward-looking statements and all other statements made during this webcast that don’t pertain to historical facts are subject to risks and uncertainties that may materially affect actual results. Please refer to our press release and corresponding Form 10-Q filing for more detail on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any described today in forward-looking statements. Any such statements are made as of today, and U.S. Global Investors accepts no obligation to update them in the future. Quickly I’ll review about U.S. Global. We are an innovative investment manager with vast experience in global markets and specialized sectors. We were founded as an Investment club, the Company became a registered investor adviser in 1968 and has had a long-standing history of global investing and launching first-of-their-kind investment products, including the first no-load gold fund. U.S. Global is well-known for expertise in gold and precious metals, natural resources, and emerging markets. And now let’s go to Frank Holmes, CEO and CIO, for an overview of the period. Frank?

Well, thank you, Holly. Thank you everyone. Happy Valentine's Day. We’ll talk a little bit about that Love Trade when we get to gold. But right now our strengths are we’re the go-to stock for exposure in emerging markets, resources, gold and digital currencies. And I'm going to talk about that – the volatility of the digital currencies and our investments there rather than trying to launch ETF, have impacted our volatile growing stock and I think that's important positive and negatively. Debt free, strong balance sheet, reflexive cost structure, and monthly dividends, return on equity discipline. The next visual I want to thank all of our shareholders, those in particular and see the active fund managers that have been very loyal, through this whole period. The Royce Funds, The Financial Investment Management Group out of Michigan and Perritt Capital, and Vanguard and Blackrock is strongly in their index funds. But I just want to really thank active fund managers because I realized, and I'll talk about a little later, this is the challenges of being an active fund manager and some of the issues with this whole wealth phenomena of ETFs and what we're doing in that space. But I think the other important part is that we've consistently paid for more than 10 years. A dividend is modest, the yield is the more attractive than the S&P 500. And we've continued to buy back stock on a, basically it is a quant approach and we buy back stocks as the stock is more volatile and we may suspend or discontinue any time. I think for the last quarter we bought back a minimal amount of 11,000 shares, which is approximately $13,000. Our balance sheet, as you can see, has lots of securities and investments and, that's something that's…

Thank you, Frank. Good morning. Before I summarize our results of operations, I'd like to discuss the investment accounting pronouncement that we adopted this year. Slide 28 notes changes in the accounting rules related to our investment that is expected to cause our earnings to be more volatile. We adopted Accounting Standards Update, ASU 2016-01 recognition in measurement of financial assets and financial liabilities effective July 1, 2018. This amended the guidance and the classification of measurement of investments in equity securities and certain disclosures. Starting in this fiscal year, some of our corporate investments are accounted for differently than in the past. There was no longer an available-for-sale classification for equity securities with readily determinable fair value. And as part of the adoption of the new standard, we made a required cumulative effective adjustment and reclassified $3.1 million in unrealized net gains and $1 million in related deferred tax expense out of accumulated comprehensive income and into retained earnings. Effective July 1, 2018, changes in fair values of investments formerly classified as available-for-sale are now reported through earnings, rather than comprehensive income. This includes any changes in the market value of our investment in HIVE. The impact to earnings for this change for the quarter ending December 31, 2018 was an investment loss of $2.8 million. These losses are related to unrealized declines in securities formerly classified as available-for-sale and previously would have been reduced our comprehensive income, rather than investment income. The majority of this amount is related to a decline in market value in our investment in HIVE. And though we had an investment loss related to HIVE for the quarter ending December 31, 2018 as of yesterday, the market value of the Company's investment in HIVE was higher than our cost. What shareholders need to understand…

Thank you, Lisa. All right, as you can see a majority of our mutual fund assets are in emerging markets and natural resources, while 36% are in domestic equities and fixed income. As for distribution, more than three quarters of assets come from retail investors with 18% coming from institutional investors. Our sales and marketing efforts have continued to focus on mutual funds, including those concentrated on gold, natural resources and emerging markets as well as our exchange-traded funds. The company and our funds continue to receive an invaluable amount of viral publicity gained through media interviews. Frank Holmes often shares his insights with financial outlets like CNBC Asia, Bloomberg Radio and Kitco News, just to name a few. We continue to receive recommendations by influential financial newsletter writers as well, along with sharing and syndication of our award-winning original content by third-party publishers. The newsletters have loyal following and receive millions of visitors each month. Frank Holmes' CEO blog, Frank Talk, continues to grow in popularity as well. His commentary is often featured by prominent publications like Forbes, Seeking Alpha, The Crux and Business Insider with millions of monthly visitors. We like to call Frank Holmes our globetrotter because he, along with others on our investment team, travel around the world to share our thought leadership. We also interact frequently with our loyal followers through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. One of our core values that U.S. Global Investors is curiosity to learn and improve. We believe that providing educational material to investors is one way of many to achieve this. Some of our most recent pieces include What’s Driving Energy handout and our Gold's Fear Trade white paper. Both of which are available for download on usfunds.com. Kitco News, the biggest gold website in the world…

And as a reminder, you can enter the questions in the control panel on your screen. And I do have a couple of questions. The first I'll start with, directing towards Lisa. It says in the last webcast, you mentioned the possibility of selling or leasing out a portion of the headquarters building. Can you give us an update on progress with that?

Sure. Actually we have made some progress in this area. Currently, we are in the process of finalizing a lease for a few thousand square feet of our building. And though it's a small area that rent will help offset some of our building costs. We are considering making some capital improvements, that may increase the interest in the office space we have available but we're still open to selling the building of a favorable opportunity present itself. So we are progressing in leasing but we're also keeping our options open.

Great. Thank you. And Frank, you kind of mentioned this during the presentation, but this question is for you, it says, do you think growth stock will continue moving with the price of cryptos or do you think it will revert back to tracking the movements in gold mainly as it's done in the past?

I think it moves with both. What's more volatile in the short-term as we seen is bitcoin and Ethereum. So I think the impact on our balance sheet is attracting investors that uses us as a second derivative in that crypto world, where a lot of people do not want to go in and open an account at Coinbase, they don’t want to – they’re afraid of that. They're not afraid of buying stocks in speculating. And so I think that's the biggest part is to recognize that small cap investing, microcap investing in new technologies, new biotechnology, new oil or gas fracking or coal mining exploration or Blockchain, the mining that this is all speculative investing. And what I heard was at a conference recently, was really surprised me in Vancouver, we had 2,000 people show up in a Sunday morning. 500 people showed up at 8:30 in the morning. And the comments were that it's okay to go, it's easy to go and speculate buying a lottery ticket or go to the casino. But to speculate in a small cap stock is too risky. So I thought that was sort of an interesting debate and discussion regarding that topic. And so I think that people – that the speculators up there and looking us speculate in the Ethereum market. They're using us a proxy and now they’re going directly to HIVE.

Great. Thank you. One more for you, Frank. Can you share any goals or updates as we move towards the rest of 2019 that you want to leave listeners with?

Excuse me. I think the rates will peak this year and that peaking will basically see the dollar become weaker and gold, as I've said before, in a blink of an eye, it just starts to surge. And we're witnessing – we've written about this, new banks, central bankers buying gold. It's a 50-year high in new countries' central banks buying gold. And 50 years ago, Hungary, Poland, these economies were communist type economies. They had no control of it. Now they have a GDP growth rates twice the year old. And they have been big buyers of gold. So I think you're going to continue to see that that buying of gold from China, Russia, Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe Bloc countries as a way to diversify their themselves, just like Ray Dalio does, who runs the biggest hedge fund in the world. And he's always advocated a position in gold as a parity against bonds and other currencies. And I think it's just wise for investors that follow the 10% golden rule and have some exposure towards the industry and rebalance once a year.

Great. Thank you. This concludes U.S. Global Investors’ webcast for the second quarter of 2019. This presentation will be available on our website at usfunds.com. And thank you all for your participation today.