Blackboxstocks Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Black Box Stocks first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephanie Prince with PCG Advisory. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Matt, and welcome to everyone joining us today. On the call with me are Black Box Stock CEO Gus Kepler and Bob Winspear, CFO. The company would like to remind everyone that various remarks about future expectations, plans, and prospects made on today's call constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Black Box Stocks cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause their actual results to differ materially from those indicated, including risks described in the company's filings with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made on this conference call speak only as of today's date, Tuesday, May 17, 2022. Black Box Stocks does not intend to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after today. A replay of today's conference call will be available through the investor relations section of the Black Box website at blackboxstocks.com. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to CEO Gus Kepler. Gus?

Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning. I want to thank all our shareholders, members, and shareholder members for joining the call. today for an update, for our Q1 update. It's been a very interesting first quarter. I don't have to tell anyone on this call that the market's been turbulent, volatile, unpredictable in many ways. And in some ways that creates headwinds for a company like ours. The sole purpose is to provide services for traders in the stock and options markets. The turbulent markets can be very, very good for experienced or seasoned traders, but it often dissuades new members or potential new members from joining our service. So this is a situation where we are very careful to market to new members by letting them know that volatile markets often create an opportunity and can be a trader's best friend. Nonetheless, it still makes marketing to new members or potential new members a difficult task. The good news is we've been here before. We've survived multiple market dips, volatile markets and flat markets. We're not a new service. We went live in 2016 and we weathered the storm over our five year history when markets were not on a bull run. So we know how to do it now. And we did it previously with far less capital or development or tech resources. The previous bull market in 2020 and 2021 especially spawned a plethora of new services, software providers, and chat rooms that compete with our potential new members acquiring our products. So this has also cluttered up the social media channels and made it more difficult for us to get our message out to users, our potential members. That said, many of those that were able to leverage small capital resources and get into business during the good times have already not been able to survive the difficult markets. And in addition, some of the new services that are viable players may be potential acquisition targets for us as we're well capitalized and have the ability to look at new technology, not always as competition, but sometimes as an acquisition target. But as I said, many of the new players in the market that sometimes send a bad message, have substandard services, and give a bad user experience to potential new members have already been washed out. The other potential competitors, we still feel like we have the very best service, but the other ones, like I said, can serve as a potential acquisition target. The current market trend also makes it a little more difficult to acquire new members because unlike the COVID downtrend in the market, we don't have a captive audience sitting at home anymore getting government checks that they want to parlay in the stock market. Having said that, there's still a great interest in our platform, and although we've had headwinds this first quarter, We've been very successful in March in growing our subscriber base. We did what we called a spring breakout sale. And this was the very first time that we offered a extreme discount, almost free trial scenario for new members. We have been against doing those type of promotions previously. Didn't think they were necessary. And we always felt like when you do those type of promotions, you get less than serious new customers if they're not willing to make a $100 investment, which is the price of our software per month. But this particular market trend was a reason to try something new, and we're very, very glad we did. We had an enormous onboarding in March. We grew our user base substantially towards the end of the month. We closed out March 31 with 7,400 members, which at that time was a record of new users, or actual total users, I'm sorry. And this further showed us that we have the capacity to be successful even in difficult stock market scenarios. So I'm very happy to say that sometimes necessity is the mother of invention and we went ahead and strayed from our norms and it was a very, very positive thing for us here. One thing I'll emphasize is after our IPO last November, we have the capital and the financial wherewithal to do these marketing initiatives. The only downside is it cost us some revenue in the first quarter numbers because we gave our service away for essentially $5 per new user. So everyone that signed up for a large portion of March paid $5 instead of the normal 99.97. So that's... A summary of addressing our current market. Bob Winspear, our CFO, is going to go over our specific numbers and answer any questions that you might have with regard to our Q1 numbers. I will make one notation. When comparing Q1 2021 to Q1 2022, Q1 2021 was extremely skewed, in my opinion, because it was at the height of the meme stock craze. where everybody, their uncle, their cousin, and their stepbrother wanted to be a stock trader during the rise of the retail investor boom, Wall Street, Betts, GameStop, AMC, and all that went along with that phenomenon. So those were unusually high numbers, and this particular market scenario kind of muted our ability to continue to show the growth that we have quarter over quarter, year over year. Having said that, I'll recap. We did grow our subscriber base substantially in spite of the very, very difficult market trends that currently exist. Moving forward, we are not a one-dimensional company. Our core product is strong. We've improved it substantially, and we continue to make improvements that I believe put us in the best-of-class scenario for the type of product we offer for day traders and swing traders. But there's a broader market we intend to address. We have a portfolio management tool under the working name Stock Nanny, which we think will address the broader self-directed investor market, which is exponentially larger than the day trader market. In the 100 million user range – total size of market. We also are working on the Black Box Pro system. And we are very interested in doing this because it provides our platform access to professional traders, institutions, and other seasoned traders. And that is a market we haven't been able to address as of yet because there's a different price tier for professionals. So we're very excited about bringing that product into the marketplace this year as well. We've also launched a crypto initiative. All the cryptocurrency markets have taken as much of a beating, if not more of a beating, than the stock market. Markets are cyclical. We've weathered two or three dips in the stock market, and we're not going to be dissuaded from getting into the cryptocurrency market because cryptocurrency is currently in a downtrend. The cream will rise, I believe, and good crypto currencies will prevail. The other ones will be shaken out, and I still think it's a very viable market. So we are working with one of our technology partners, CoinRoute, to provide a very unique experience for crypto traders that we don't think currently exists. And we're excited to bring that out in 2022 as well. We are also very pleased to announce we've built our technology team substantially since our IPO. We have the financial resources to add new developers so that we can build these products in parallel while we continue to improve our core products. We're also enhancing our marketing initiatives. As I said earlier, many of these new services clutter up the social media channels, cause confusion, and often are not beneficial to companies that do legitimate business. There's a lot of bad actors that make very – unrealistic promises to potential new traders. To get above that market noise, we are expanding our budget, our messaging, and we are also going to start a TV advertising campaign on financial networks so that we broaden our reach and further enhance our brand. We already have an amazing brand loyalty, but we want to get out above the social media market noise. So I can't say exactly when, but we expect to be on TV within the next two weeks. We think that'll really send a good message about our brand to the market. We've already been around for five years, established ourselves. We're in 42 countries. We have thousands of traders. an amazing global brand, and we just plan to enhance that. In addition to our technology hires that we think will be significant in ramping up our development and rolling out our products in parallel, we also have been engaged in a stock buyback program. Bob will speak to all the numbers, but we've bought 436,600 shares for an aggregate sum of $860,000. We authorized a $2.5 million buyback, so we are not even at the halfway point yet. And we do this because we're very confident in what we're doing. We think BlackBox has a very bright future because we don't think we've scratched the surface of the market yet, not only in the day trader market, but also... in the broader financial markets and financial services markets. So, having said that, we have the team, financial resources, and an amazing global community of traders that make our product what it is every day. That's what makes BlackBox unique. It's not just our superior analytics and data that we provide traders in real time. It's the community and the community platform that interacts daily that provides the unique best of man and machine experience that is Black Box. Having said that, we're looking forward to very robust 2022. Although our first quarter numbers were not as explosive as we had hoped, I believe that we'll continue on the same annual growth trajectory we have over the last two or three years. And now that we're more well capitalized, have the resources to outspend, outlast, and create superior products to our competitors, we're looking forward to a very, very exciting year and years to come. With that, I'll turn it over to Bob.