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spk04: Hello, thank you for standing by and welcome to Westwood Holdings Group, Inc. Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Julie Guerin, General Counsel. Please go ahead.
spk00: Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. The following discussion will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual results to be materially different from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning the factors that could cause such a difference is included in our press release issued earlier today, as well as in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30th, 2022 that is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. In addition, in accordance with SEC rules concerning non-GAAP financial measures, the reconciliation of our economic earnings and economic earnings per share to the most comparable GAAP measures is included at the end of our press release issued earlier today. On the call today, we have Brian Casey, our Chief Executive Officer, and Terry Forbes, our Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Brian Casey.
spk01: Good afternoon, and thanks for listening to our quarterly earnings call. Last quarter, I shared with you the results from our multi-asset and distribution teams, as well as our successes in expanding our wealth management business. This month, we're celebrating an important milestone, our 20th anniversary as a publicly traded company. While our recent stock performance has been disappointing to us all, we're enormously proud to have delivered over $258 million in dividends to our shareholders over the past two decades. We feel good about our position as a firm and look forward to integrating the Salient team and building our business together in the years ahead. There were several notable items from our investment, distribution, and business teams to highlight this quarter. We announced an agreement to acquire Salient Partners Asset Management Business, which delivers a unique, complementary product set, along with highly accretive earnings to Westwood. Our U.S. value team outperformed their benchmarks in every product strategy during a difficult down market. Our multi-asset, systematic small-cap growth product continues to post strong relative returns and our alternative income strategy ranked first percentile in its Morningstar category for the quarter. The first half of this year witnessed the worst performing stock and bond market in over 50 years, as markets factored in accelerating inflation, rising interest rates, and record Fed tightening amid continuing geopolitical tensions. All domestic asset classes declined, and the damage was not confined solely to equities, as fixed income securities experienced rising yields, and lower prices. Against this backdrop, I'm pleased to report that all our U.S. value strategies outperformed in this very difficult quarter. Our small cap strategy bounced back from last quarter's underperformance, beating the Russell 2000 value index by almost 390 basis points. Among its institutional peers, small cap value ranks in the top quartile in the small cap value universe. MidCap also showed improvement versus the Russell 2500 Value Benchmark and finished the quarter ahead by 125 basis points and beat the trailing one year by almost 130 basis points. In Large Cap, our team beat the Russell 1000 Value Index by over 100 basis points. Large Cap has outperformed its benchmark year-to-date and over all trailing time periods. Among institutional peers in the eVestment Large Cap Value universe, Large cap ranks in the 37th percentile for the trailing one year ended June 30th. To wrap up, our all-cap and mid-cap strategies also beat their benchmarks this quarter, outperforming the Russell 3000 value by 150 basis points and Russell mid-cap value by 304 basis points, respectively. All-cap ranked in the top third of institutional peers in the investment all-cap value universe for the quarter, and mid-cap value ranked in the 29th percentile among its institutional mid-cap value peers. Three multi-asset strategies, total return, income opportunity, and high income, saw the positive effects of the first quarter's equity overweight shift into reverse. Equity markets were negatively impacted by P.E. compression, and fixed income markets were hurt by changes in interest rates and the yield curve. Our largest multi-asset strategy, Income Opportunity, finished 170 basis points behind its benchmark, which consists of 40% S&P 500 and 60% Bloomberg Barclays Aggregate Bond Index. WHGIX, our Income Opportunity Mutual Fund, retained its strong four-star Morningstar rating in the 30 to 50% equity category through mid-year, with a 28th percentile ranking for trailing three years, 30th percentile for trailing five years, and 19th percentile for trailing seven and 10 years. Our total return mutual fund, WLVIX, and high-income mutual fund, WHGHX, trailed their blended benchmarks this quarter by 101 basis points and 247 basis points, respectively, due in part to an overweight in equities. Our alternative income mutual fund, ticker WMNIX, declined 2.3% on an absolute basis for the quarter. This strategy invests a meaningful portion of its funds in convertible securities, and the asset class saw unusual large drawdowns this quarter. Despite these headwinds, Alternative Income Mutual Fund outperformed its peers and finished in the first percentile for the quarter and 10th percentile for the year-to-date and trailing one-year periods in Morningstar's Relative Value Arbitrage category. Credit opportunities, which we launched two years ago, outperformed the ICE B of A high yield index by approximately 284 basis points for the quarter. Credit spreads remain cheap and our team is finding attractive risk return opportunities throughout the high yield universe. Lastly, our systematic strategies outperformed their respective benchmarks. Our systematic large cap growth strategy outperformed the Russell 1000 growth by 284 basis points this quarter and is ahead year-to-date. For the quarter, systematic small cap growth outperformed the Russell 2000 growth by nearly 600 basis points. Our small cap growth mutual fund, WFCIX, is certainly off to a great start, achieving a seventh percentile ranking this quarter relative to its Morningstar small cap growth peers, and it landed in the third percentile year-to-date. Systematic small cap growth and credit opportunities have both reached their two-year anniversaries. We plan to offer these strategies to institutional prospects soon, and we are excited for the future of them both. The current environment lends itself well to our philosophy of aligning bottom-up fundamental security selection and top-down macroeconomic views. Our approach strives to generate attractive total returns while maintaining lower volatility, a key factor given the uncertainty in the markets. By investing across a diversified allocation of asset classes and risk exposures, we seek to target the most efficient alpha generation in the most attractive market areas, allocating risk between idiosyncratic and systematic risks. In our private wealth strategies, performance was mixed this past quarter. Dividend select and select equity outperformed the Russell 1000 value and Russell 3000 indices by 242 basis points and 284 basis points, respectively, this quarter, and are ahead year-to-date and over the trailing one-year time period. Dividend Select, which focuses on high-quality dividend-paying domestic securities, recently celebrated its third anniversary and remains ahead of the benchmark since inception. Its dividend yield is over 70% higher than the S&P 500's dividend yield and continues to be an attractive alternative for high net worth clients seeking income and long-term capital appreciation. High alpha lagged its benchmark as growth stocks have been under pressure. Innovation and disruption remain major investment themes in high alpha, as capital will likely continue to be invested in industries such as alternative energy and in emerging technologies such as blockchain, AI, and machine learning. We're excited about the outlook for high alpha as our team is finding many investment opportunities in these broad-based trends. Shifting to distribution, market performance was the largest driver of lower AUM this quarter, but on a positive note, within our distribution teams, we saw strong client retention, and given our improved performance in many products, we remain positioned to compete for new assets. Total assets under management this quarter included inflows of approximately $152 million, offset by outflows totaling $278 million, which net to $125 million in outflows. In our equity strategies, SmidCap had net positive flows generated by our institutional team. Our small cap and SmidCap strategies also funded two new consultant-driven accounts during the quarter. While client flows in the institutional group were negative, all flows were driven by client rebalances and participant-directed DC plan changes rather than client losses. In our intermediary channel, our best gross sales came in through small cap, income opportunity, and alternative income. Our intermediary team continues to focus on client retention across all of our strategies. Within the realm of U.S. value, the most promising prospects for intermediary sales look to be in small cap value, where we detect a potential rebound in demand if the asset class and our strategy perform well during the second half. Our current pipeline has selected wins awaiting funding in the small cap and SMID cap strategies, with some promising prospects in early review stages. Our institutional team is focused on leveraging the opportunities provided by our attractive U.S. value strategies, as well as defined contribution replacement searches, which continue to generate new business activity. Newly launched strategies such as small cap growth, along with expanding consultant approvals, form the basis of the key growth initiatives for the institutional distribution team in 2022. Turning to wealth management, our teams produced inflows of approximately $190 million, offset by outflows of about $286 million. Inflows were driven largely by new clients, additions to existing client accounts, including sales proceeds and retirement plan contributions, while outflows primarily reflected federal tax payments, one asset transfer to support a line of credit, and a few client losses. Our client retention here today is running close to 97%. The first half of each year tends to be more challenging due to tax payments made by our high net worth clients, and we expect to see better flows in the second half of the year. Our wealth team's optimism is based on a strong pipeline with several large opportunities in the wings. Our advisors have invested a lot of time with CPAs and other centers of influence partners to deepen existing ties and form new relationships. We recently consolidated our Dallas and Houston offices under the leadership of Leah Bennett after running the two teams separately for several years. Consolidating our wealth teams in this way strengthens our ability to serve as a family office for clients across the state of Texas, allows us to provide a more proactive, expanded planning service to clients, and to convey a unified marketing message. As the largest independent trust company in Texas, Our scale makes us attractive to high net worth individuals, especially in the $10 to $50 million range. Our experience is that clients want a more holistic and customized approach that banks with less flexibility or smaller firms with limited resources find difficult or impossible to provide. Texas is a very attractive market as people continue to move into the state. And in fact, Dallas is one of the top 10 fastest growing markets in the world for high net worth individuals. We believe these exciting changes will enable us to grow faster while providing unparalleled service to our clients. We were extremely pleased to announce an agreement to acquire the asset management business of Salient Partners, which has offices in Houston and San Francisco. Salient is a well-known, highly respected asset manager focused on energy infrastructure, real estate, and tactical allocation strategies. As I mentioned earlier, this acquisition will be highly accretive for Westwood. Salient's team is a great cultural fit, and their products are scalable as we leverage the capabilities of our combined distribution teams. Our multi-asset team will benefit from Salient's enhanced energy, real estate, and tactical asset allocation strengths through their affiliate, which is called Broadmark, and we also foresee many opportunities to collaborate on new product offerings. An added plus is that the Salient suite of products looks very timely, given global energy supply shortages, commodity markets near all-time highs, and increasing inflationary pressures. We plan to consolidate Salient's Houston team adjacent to our current Houston office space and will consolidate the Broadmark Tactical Equity team and real estate team into shared space in San Francisco. Deal-related costs for the second quarter totaled $731,000. and the transaction is targeted for close in the fourth quarter. We were pleased to announce the promotion of Fabian Gomez from Chief Operating Officer to President of Westwood Holdings Group. Fabian will leverage his broad-based asset management experience in supervising our enterprise support services as well as our distribution teams. Porter Montgomery was promoted to replace Fabian as Westwood's Chief Operating Officer, where he will bring his strong operational skills to the oversight of our investment operations teams supporting our wealth and institutional businesses. As for me, I'll remain a CEO, and as a result of this reorganization, I'll be able to devote more time to the successful integration of Salient Partners and other M&A opportunities that may come down the road. We clearly have plenty of exciting opportunities looking forward, but it's also fun from time to time to reflect on where we've come from. It's been 20 years since we began trading on the NYSE, For sure, we've had to navigate many challenges, but I'm proud to say that we've never strayed from our investment disciplines and that we've continuously worked to improve our business model with significant and timely investments in people, product development, and technology. We delivered over a quarter billion of dividends to our shareholders over the past two decades, and we'd like to thank all who have supported us over the years, including our investors. We plan to continue building on that success and look forward to integrating Salient and seizing more opportunities that lie ahead. I'll now turn the call over to Terry Forbes, our CFO.
spk03: Thanks, Brian, and good afternoon, everyone. Today we reported total revenues of $15.6 million for the second quarter of 2022 compared to $17.2 million for the first quarter and $17.5 million in the prior year's second quarter. Revenues were lower than first quarter and last year's second quarter, reflecting lower average assets under management, namely attributable to the downdraft affecting markets worldwide. The second quarter net loss of $0.4 million, or $0.05 per share, compared unfavorably with net income of $0.1 million, or $0.01 per share, in the first quarter due to lower revenues, partially offset by lower expenses, primarily employee compensation and benefits. Non-GAF economic earnings were $1.6 million, or $0.20 per share, in the current quarter versus $1.9 million, or $0.24 per share, in the first quarter. The second quarter net loss of $0.4 million, or $0.05 per share, declined from last year's second quarter net income of $1 million, or $0.12 per share, primarily on lower revenues, partially offset by lower expenses, primarily employee compensation and benefits. Economic earnings for the quarter were 1.6 million or 20 cents per share compared with 2.8 million or 35 cents per share in the second quarter of 2021. Firmwide assets under management totaled 12.1 billion at quarter end and consisted of institutional assets of 5.9 billion or 49% of the total, wealth management assets of 3.7 billion or 30% of the total, and mutual fund assets of 2.6 billion or 21% of the total. Over the quarter, we experienced market depreciation of $1.5 billion and net outflows of $183 million. Our financial position continues to be very solid, with cash and short-term investments at quarter end totaling $73.6 million and a debt-free balance sheet. I'm happy to announce that our Board of Directors approved a regular cash dividend of 15 cents per common share payable on October 1, 2022, to stockholders of record on September 2, 2022. That brings our prepared comments to a close. We encourage you to review our investor presentation posted on our website, reflecting quarterly highlights, as well as a discussion of our business, product development, and longer-term trends in revenues and earnings. We thank you for your interest in our company, and we'll open the line to questions.
spk04: Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. Please stand by. We compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from a Gray Sykes. You may proceed with your question, with Gabelli.
spk02: Good afternoon, and congratulations to the firm on Adrian's article and Barron's. It was quite impressive.
spk01: Thanks, Mark.
spk02: I had two questions, and I'll just ask them so that it's easier, both related to Salient. So first, maybe you could just provide us some feedback that you've gotten since the announcement in May from, I guess, the clients, consultants, perhaps the intermediary channel, just about your acquisition going forward on Salient. And then my second question is, once you close the deal, how should we think about ramping up the timing of realizing some of the revenue synergies from the combination? Thank you.
spk01: Great. Okay. Well, first I'll say, Mac, that the salient products include midstream energy, renewables, real estate, and hedged equity with Broadmark in San Francisco. And they're highly complementary to our U.S. value and multi-asset product line. And the feedback we've received so far has been very positive. We think that we can help them immediately in the institutional area, particularly in the midstream product area. They're one of the survivors that has a good long-term track record in a space that is increasing, increasingly getting flows. After a couple of rough years, it started to turn the other way with the realization that energy is 4% or 5% of the S&P now, whereas historically it's been more than double that. So people are beginning to take a look and look at the long life return potential for the asset class. In the intermediary channel, we feel like expanding the team is going to help us in both the RIA and the broker-dealer channels. Salient has a really good footprint in the broker-dealer area, and we have a really strong presence in the RIA area, and I think putting the two together will really allow us to further attack the market. And to answer your second question, while we can't do anything about the stock and bond market decline which hit all asset managers. Our core business performed relatively well from a flow perspective and exceptionally well from a client retention perspective. We've not lost a single institutional client this year and our client retention rate in the wealth business is 96%. We had some unusual non-operating expenses this quarter as many of you saw with BlackRock and and some of the other asset managers that have reported recently, the total non-operating expense losses for us were $1.656 million, which consisted of $731,000 of deal expenses, seed money and deferred bonus pool mark-to-market write-downs of $623,000, and a fair value adjustment to our investment in Westwood Private Bank of $302,000. So absent all of these non-operating expenses, we would have posted a much better quarter. And in the meantime, we continue to prune expenses, buy back stock, and prepare for the highly accretive integration of Salient and their subsidiary Broadmark. And as mentioned previously, Salient is a $30 million plus run rate revenue business. And we modeled it at industry average margins of 25% to 35%, which would be $7.5 to $10.5 million in earnings to the bottom line. So, nothing we've seen thus far in our due diligence has changed our view, but we've got more work to do towards closing.
spk05: Great. Thank you.
spk01: Thanks for your question.
spk04: Thank you. And as a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star 1-1. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Brian Casey for any further remarks.
spk01: Well, thank you. We appreciate your interest in Westwood. And please follow up. Visit our website at westwoodgroup.com or call myself or Terry directly if you have any further questions. Thanks for your time.
spk04: Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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