Artisan Partners Asset Management Inc. Class A

Good afternoon and welcome to the Artisan Partners Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please limit your questions to two in order to allow time for other questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Eric Colson, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Welcome to the Artists and Partners Asset Management Business Update and Earnings Call. Today's call will include remarks from Eric Colson, CEO, Jason Godley, President, and CJ Daly, CFO. Following these remarks, we'll open the line for questions. Our latest results and investor presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that comments made during today's call, including responses to questions, may include forward-looking statements. If you are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to the factors set forth in our earnings release and detailed in our SEC filings. Risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the statements, and we have no obligation to update or revise any of these statements following the presentation. In addition, some of our remarks today will include references to non-GAAP financial measures, You can find reconciliations of those measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in the earnings release and the supplemental materials, which can also be found on our investor relations website. Also, please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell an interest in any Artisan investment product or a recommendation for any investment service. I'll turn it over to Eric Olson.

Thank you for joining the call or reading the transcript. For us, these calls are an opportunity to repeatedly communicate who we are, what we seek to accomplish, and the time horizons that matter to us. We intentionally de-emphasize quarterly and annual outcomes. Instead, we focus on what we are doing to create and maintain an environment and culture that maximizes the probability of long-term performance for clients, talent, and shareholders. Artisan Partners is a high-value-added investment firm designed for talent to thrive in a thoughtful growth environment. Our purpose is to compound wealth for clients over long time periods. We do this through our talent-driven business model. We attract, recruit, and partner with exceptional and differentiated investment leaders, and we give them autonomy, resources, and time to generate investment returns over long time periods. As Jason will discuss, we have been doing this for nearly 30 years in public equities for a decade in fixed income and are in the early innings in alternatives. Time is a crucial ingredient in what we do. We protect the time of our investment teams so they can maximize time spent on research, investing, and adding value for clients. We work to earn time to extend duration. We do this by being true to who we are. by maintaining a culture focused on long-term, by avoiding the temptation to engineer short-term results, by remaining disciplined through difficult periods, by constantly communicating our time horizon to clients and shareholders, setting the right expectations and doing business with individuals, allocators, and institutions that are aligned with our long-term approach. The chart on slide two reinforces why we focus on the long term. Short time periods are noisy. Skill and luck are indistinguishable. Over longer periods, the value of process and discipline become apparent. As we extend time, the value of what we do becomes evident. Of our five strategies with 20-year track records, all five have added value over the period after fees. With enough time, alpha can compound into meaningfully more wealth for clients and investors, a simple example of which is on the right side of the slide. We take a similar long-term approach to developing our business. We look for opportunities that are consistent with who we are and where we have an edge. We are methodical, we don't chase fads, and we remain focused on high-value added investing. If we do these things with patience, we are confident that quality long-term outcomes will follow. I've asked Jason to elaborate on this approach as it applies to our investment platform.