Raymond James Financial, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the earnings call for Raymond James Financial's fiscal first quarter of 2019. My name is John and I will be your conference facilitator today. This call is being recorded and will be available in the company's website. Now, I will turn it over to Paul Shukri, Treasurer and Head Investor Relations at Raymond James Financial.

Thank you, John. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us on this call. We appreciate your time and interest in Raymond James Financial. After I read the following disclosure, I'll turn the call over to Paul Riley, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff Julian, our Chief Financial Officer. Following the prepared remarks, they will ask the operator to open the line for questions. Certain statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, information concerning future strategic objectives, business prospects, financial results, acquisitions, our ability to successfully recruit and integrate financial advisors, anticipated results of litigation, and regulatory developments or general economic conditions. In addition, words such as believes, expects, plans, and future conditional words such as will, could, and would as well as any other statement that necessarily depends on future events or intended to identify forward-looking statements. Please note these forward-looking statements are subject to risk and there can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from those expressed in those statements. We urge you to consider the risk described in our most recent form, 10-K. During the call, we will also use certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide information pertinent to our management's view of ongoing business performance. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures may be found in the schedule accompanying our press release. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Paul Reilly, Chairman and CEO of Raymond James Financial. Paul?

Great. Thanks, Paul, and good morning, everyone. I know you're having a lot of weather up there in the Midwest and Northeast, and I want you to know we're empathetic here. Our temperature has plunged from 80 yesterday to 70 today. So anyway, hopefully it will rebound as the market did a little bit in January. I'm going to go over the first quarter fiscal results, and I'm going to turn over to Jeff, who's going to give you some more detailed kind of color on the numbers, and then I'll feedback for a quick outlook. So overall, as we look at last quarter, we certainly had elevated volatility, market declines in December, market uncertainty. Given all that, I think we had a very strong quarter. Now, there are lots of moving parts, so I hope we can provide some clarity to you on the call. Overall, we had a record quarter net revenue of $1.93 billion. up 12% over the prior year's quarter and 2% over the preceding record quarter, last quarter. We had broad-based growth in revenues. We had record quarterly revenues for the private client group, the asset management group, and RJ Bank. The quarterly net income of $249 million or $1.69 per diluted share was up 15% over last year's quarter but down 5% over the preceding quarter. But if you recall, both the prior quarter and the preceding quarter were impacted by adjustments, including the Tax Act. So if you look at it more apples to apples, the adjusted income of $264 million, or $1.79 per diluted share for the quarter, this excludes a $15 million loss on the disposition of our European equity research business. Given MIFID II and our scale, we just felt it was not a good investment for us. However, I want to note we're continuing our highly successful North American equity research sales in Europe, which we've done for decades successfully. This also has no impact on our growth and investment in our European investment banking operations.