Virtus Investment Partners, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Jacinda, and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to the Virtus Investment Partners quarterly conference call. The slide presentation for this call is available in the investor relations section of the Virtus website at www.Virtus.com. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay on the Virtus website. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer period, and instructions will follow at that time. I will now turn the conference to your host, Sean Rourke.

Thanks, Jacinda. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Vertis Investment Partners' discussion of our second quarter of 2026 Financial and Operating Results. Joining me today are George Aylward, our President and CEO, and Mike Angerthal, our Chief Financial Officer. After their prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin, I'll refer you to the disclosures on slide two. Today's comments may include forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties described in our news release and SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in today's news release and financial supplement on our website.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to George. George? Thank you, Sean, and good morning, everyone. I will start with an overview of the results we reported this morning, and then Mike will provide more detail. While our results continue to reflect the challenging environment for quality-oriented equity strategies, there were several positive underlying trends during the quarter, which included a meaningful improvement in total net flows, over $1 billion of positive net flows excluding the quality equity strategies, our strongest quarter of institutional sales and net flows in nearly three years, Positive Net Flows and Alternatives, Fixed Income, and Multi-Asset Strategies, Higher Sales Across Multiple Products, including Institutional Wealth Management and ETFs, and Continued Return of Capital to Shareholders while Reducing Debt. We also continue to broaden our product offerings in areas where we see attractive growth opportunities. During the quarter, we introduced new actively managed ETFs from Duff & Phelps & Sullivan, Further expanding our ETF platform and providing clients with differentiated investment solutions. ETFs have continued to generate positive net flows, and from our perspective, our ETF business has grown significantly from just $1 billion five years ago and generated $2 billion of net flows in the past year alone. We remain focused on expanding our capabilities and product offerings in ETFs and other areas where we see growing client demand and attractive opportunities for long-term growth. Turning to investment performance, outside of quality equity, our performance remains strong across periods. Fixed income and alternative strategies have had consistently strong performance, with 80% and 67% respectively beating benchmarks for the three-year period. Over a longer 10-year period, 73% of our fixed income and 67% of alternative strategies beat their benchmarks. Our equity investment performance reflects our overweight to quality-oriented equity strategies. These strategies have had the opportunity to demonstrate strong performance in more constructive markets, which have been absent for the past two years. However, we have seen indications of the impact of such opportunities, for example, in the most recent period since late June. While it is still early in the quarter and a very short time frame, nearly every quality strategy has been outperforming its benchmarks quarter to date, and some meaningfully so. The improvement has coincided with a broadening market environment that is more supportive of fundamentally driven active security selection and is consistent with the type of market in which these strategies have historically performed well. Again, with such a short period, it is difficult to draw a conclusion on the cycle, but it does demonstrate the opportunity when it does change. Looking at our second quarter results, assets under management were $152 billion on June 30th, up from $149 billion, primarily due to market performance. Total sales increased 5% to $6.1 billion, with higher sales of institutional, wealth management, and ETFs. For institutional and wealth management, it was our highest level of sales in several years. Total net outflows improved to $5.6 billion from $8.4 billion due to both higher sales and lower redemptions. Byproduct net flows improved sequentially for institutional, Intermediary Sold Retail Separate Accounts, ETFs, and Wealth Management. Looking at flows across asset classes and consistent with prior quarters, the net outflows reflected the continued style headwind for quality-oriented strategies. Outside of those strategies, positive net flows were broad-based across managers spanning fixed income, alternatives, multi-asset, and equity strategies that do not have a quality orientation. In terms of what we've seen in July, U.S. retail fund sales and net flows are tracking more favorably than in each month of the second quarter, and ETF net flows continue at a similar pace. On the institutional side, while known redemptions do exceed known wins, the sales pipeline is stronger than it has been in a year and is diversified across five managers and six strategies. In addition, we anticipate issuing a new CLO later this year. Turning now to our financial results, earnings per share and the operating margin each increased sequentially due to the impact of prior quarter seasonal expenses, offset partially by a discrete non-cash expense item related to previously issued investment professional stock awards. The operating margin was 26.1%, up from 24%, and excluding the discrete item was 28.2%. Earnings per share as adjusted at $5.54, increased from $5.38, and were $5.97, excluding the discrete item. In terms of our balance sheet and capital, we ended the quarter with cash and equivalents of $176 million, CECLO and other investments of $273 million, and $220 million of undrawn capacity on our revolving credit facility. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 70,000 shares for $10 million and paid our quarterly dividend. We continue to have financial flexibility to balance our capital priorities of investing in the business, returning capital to shareholders, and maintaining appropriate leverage. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike to provide more detail on the results. Mike? Thank you, George.