AGF Management Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Q1 2026 AGF Management Limited Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to To introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Tseng, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. I'm Ken Tseng, Chief Financial Officer of AJF Management Limited. Today, we will be discussing the financial results for the first quarter of 2026. Slides supporting today's call and webcasts can be found in the investor relations section of AJF.com. Also speaking on the call today will be Judy Goldring, Chief Executive Officer. For the Q&A period following the presentation, Ash Lawrence, Head of AGF Capital Partners, and David Stonehouse, Interim Chief Investment Officer, will also be available to address questions. Slide four provides the agenda for today's call. After the prepared remarks, we will be happy to take questions. With that, I will now turn the call over to Judy.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Before we get into the specifics of the quarter, I'd like to touch on some exciting news for AGS Investments announced late yesterday. Following a comprehensive global search, we are thrilled to welcome John Porter as Chief Investment Officer for AGS Investments, effective May 1, 2026. John brings decades of investment management and leadership experience overseeing investment management teams across markets and asset classes. John will also join AGS Executive Management Team and will report directly to me. I want to sincerely thank David Stonehouse for his contributions as interim chief investment officer. David provided steady leadership that helped ensure disciplined execution and oversight of the investment management team during a pivotal period for the firm. Looking ahead, I'm confident that under John's leadership, the investment team culture of high performance, collaboration, and risk management will continue positioning the firm for future growth. Continuing with our Q1 highlights, against the backdrop of significant market volatility, AGS continued to demonstrate the durability of our business. Outside of the impact of long-term investments, which I will speak to shortly, Q1 was a solid quarter. AUM and fee earning assets were over $60 billion at the end of Q1, up 12% from a year ago. AGS investments retail mutual fund business reported net sales of 237 million in the quarter, marking our seventh consecutive quarter of positive retail mutual fund net sales. Seven of AGS investment funds earned fund grade A plus awards, which are given annually to investment funds that have delivered consistent, outstanding risk adjusted performance throughout the year. The seven award winning funds span across our suite of equities, balanced and fixed income strategies. We continue to generate strong free cash flows, totaling $36 million in the quarter, which is up 14% from last quarter. Free cash flows were $122 million over the trailing 12 months. Our balance sheet remains strong with $432 million in short and long-term investments, net debt of $48 million with $160 million available on our credit facility. The strength of our balance sheet and capital position provides us with flexibility to deploy capital thoughtfully in line with our strategic priorities. On the back of our strong capital position, the board unanimously declared a 13.5 cent per share quarterly dividend for Q1 2026, representing an 8% increase. This is the sixth consecutive year where we have increased our dividend. Following the quarter, we were pleased to see AGF added to the NASDAQ Broad Canadian Dividend Achievers Index, reflecting our track record of consistent dividend growth and our ongoing focus on returning capital to shareholders. During the quarter, we did see revenue from our long-term investments decrease to negative 10.6 million. This represents a 2.5% decline in the value of our long-term investments during the period. As a consequence, Our adjusted EPS from AGS Capital Partners was negative 5 cents per share. Excluding AGS Capital Partners, adjusted EPS was 35 cents, which is up 21% year over year. And our adjusted diluted EPS was 30 cents in the quarter. Starting on slide six, we will provide updates on our business performance. On this slide, we break down our total AUM and fee earning assets in the categories disclosed in our MD&A and show comparisons to the prior year. AJF Investments Canadian Mutual Fund AUM was $36 billion, up 15% year-over-year, outpacing the industry increase of 14%. The growth of our ETF and SMA AUM globally remained strong, up 54% year-over-year. I'll provide more color on our mutual fund sales and ETF and SMA AUM in a moment. Segregated accounts and sub-advisory AUM decreased by 9% compared to the prior year. The decrease is driven by the redemptions from two institutional clients as disclosed in previous quarters. Sequent to quarter end, we saw inflows of $350 million from an institutional client. We continue to see strong interest in our strategies in the institutional space with a number of existing clients. Our private wealth AUM increased by 13% compared to prior year to approximately $10 billion. And our AGF capital partners AUM and fee earning assets were 4.5 billion at the end of the quarter. As a reminder, New Holland Capital's AUM of approximately $10 billion is not consolidated into AGF's total AUM and fee-earning assets at this time. Turning to slide seven, I'll provide some details on mutual fund sales. The mutual fund industry in Canada saw net positive sales of 19 billion in the quarter. AGS Investments retail mutual funds delivered the seventh consecutive quarter of positive net sales, totaling 237 million, in line with the industry net sales rate of 0.7% of AUM. Since Q1 2024, the Canadian mutual fund industry has recorded approximately 55 billion in net sales, representing 2.5% of AUM. Over that same time period, AGS retail mutual fund business generated roughly 1 billion of net sales, or 3.3% of AUM, demonstrating our ability to continually grow market share. The strength of our retail mutual fund sales reflects the successful execution of our distribution strategy and our strong investment performance. Let me provide a brief update on our investment performance. AGS Investments measures mutual fund performance by comparing gross returns before fees relative to peers within the same category, with the first percentile being the best possible performance. Our one-year performance was in the 35th percentile. Our three-year performance was in the 46th percentile. Our five-year performance was in the 39th percentile, and nearly two-thirds of our funds are outperforming our peers on the three and five year basis. Turning now to slide eight. In addition to our retail mutual fund net flows of 237 million, the AUM and our ETF and SMA vehicles, which has now reached four and a half billion, have grown at 64% on a compounded basis over the last two years. We continue to see consistent growth and momentum in our SMA vehicles across US, Canada, and Asia, where many of our strategies are available on leading wealth management platforms. In January, we launched ETF series of AGF Global Select and AGF American Growth Fund here in Canada, two funds with longstanding and proven track records. The launch expands our Canadian ETF lineup and addresses growing advisor demand for more choice in how they access our capabilities for investors. I will now pass it over to Ken to discuss our financial results.