Hello everyone. Welcome to the 2024 annual meeting of the shareholders of Diamond Hill Investment Group. I am Scott Cooley, Chairman of the Board of Diamond Hill and Chair of today's meeting. We are very pleased to have each of you here in attendance today. If there's anyone who did not register at the door, would you please do so now? As you entered the meeting room, you should have received an agenda and rules of procedure which will govern the meeting. Before we begin, I would like to take a moment to introduce others in attendance. Let me first introduce the other directors of the company. Heather Brilliant, the company's CEO. Jim Laird, the former Chair of the Board. I wanna take a moment to thank Jim. He's been an amazing Chair of the Board and a wonderful mentor to me, so we really appreciate it. This will be Jim's last shareholder meeting as a director because he's, he'll run up against the term limits next year, but he's been a wonderful director, so thank you, Jim. Paula Meyer, Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee. Nicole St. Pierre, Chair of the Compensation Committee. And L’Quentus Thomas, Chair of the Audit Committee. Also joining me is Tom Line, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. And Carlotta King, Secretary and General Counsel, who will also serve as the Inspector of Election. We will now convene the 2024 annual meeting of shareholders. Our order of business this morning will be to accept the proposals to be considered, collect the votes, and then receive a report about the results. Such proposals are set forth in detail in the proxy statement which was delivered to each of you. Immediately following the formal portion of the meeting, Heather Brilliant will provide a business update and discuss our 2023 results. We will then welcome any questions you may have about the company. I will now ask Carlotta King to report on the notice for this meeting. Thank you, Scott. On or about March 25th, 2024, written notice of this annual meeting of shareholders was mailed to our shareholders of record at the close of business on March 11th, 2024. Together with a proxy statement, a form of proxy, and our 2023 annual report to shareholders, I am submitting at this annual meeting an affidavit of mailing submitted by Equiniti Trust Company that these items were so mailed. Thanks, Carlotta. Will you now please report on the presence of quorum for the meeting? Of the 2,819,549 common shares outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting, the majority of such shares are present in person or by proxy at this meeting. Accordingly, a quorum exists and we may conduct business. Thanks, Carlotta. As set forth in the notice of meeting and our proxy materials, there are three matters to be considered and acted upon at this meeting. They are the election of six directors, the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as our independent registered public accounting firm for the 2024 fiscal year, and the approval on an advisory basis of the 2023 compensation for our named executive officers. The polls are now open and will remain open throughout discussion of the matters to be presented at this meeting. After discussion of these matters concludes, the polls will be closed and we will announce the voting results. If you wish to vote in person and did not receive a ballot, when you arrive, please raise your hand to receive a ballot. I see anyone. If you previously submitted a proxy for this meeting, you do not need to vote in person. The first matter before this meeting is the election of six directors to serve one-year terms until our 2025 annual meeting of shareholders. The board's director nominees are Heather Brilliant, Scott Cooley, Jim Laird, Paula Meyer, Nicole St. Pierre, and L’Quentus Thomas. Each director must receive more for votes than against votes in order to be elected. I have a motion with respect to the election of directors. Mr. Chairman, I hereby nominate each of Heather Brilliant, Scott Cooley, Jim Laird, Paula Meyer, Nicole St. Pierre, and L'Quentus Thomas for election as a director of the company for a term expiring at our 2025 annual meeting of shareholders. The company is not aware of any other nominees. Is there any discussion regarding director nominees? There being no further discussion, we will move to the second matter before the meeting, which is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the 2024 fiscal year. KPMG has served as our independent registered public accounting firm since October 2012. The affirmative vote of a majority of the common shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting and entitled to vote is required to ratify the appointment of KPMG. I have a motion for ratification. Mr. Chairman, I move that the appointment of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the 2024 fiscal year be ratified. Thank you. Is there any discussion regarding the motion? Hearing none, we will now move to the third matter before this meeting, which is the approval on an advisory basis of the 2023 compensation of the company's named executive officers, as disclosed in the proxy statement for the meeting. The affirmative vote of a majority of the common shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting and entitled to vote is required to approve this matter. Although the vote is advisory and not binding on the company, we value the views of our shareholders and will take into account the outcome of this vote when determining future compensation for our named executive officers. I have a motion on this matter. Mr. Chairman, I move for the adoption of the following resolution. Resolved that the company's shareholders approve on an advisory basis the 2023 compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the company's proxy statement for the 2024 annual meeting of shareholders pursuant to the compensation disclosure rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Compensation Discussion and Analysis, the 2023 Summary Compensation Table, and the other related tables and disclosures. Thank you. Is there any discussion on the motion? At this time, I will now ask those shareholders who wish to submit their ballots in person to mark your ballot with respect to each of the matters being voted upon today and return your ballots to Carlotta King. Only those shareholders who have not voted by proxy or who have revoked a previously given proxy and now wish to vote in person should submit a ballot. The polls are now closed. Carlotta, will you please report the results? Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to report the following results. Each of the directors nominated have been elected as a director of the company for a one-year term expiring at our 2025 annual meeting of shareholders. The appointment of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the 2024 fiscal year has been ratified, and the shareholders have approved on an advisory basis the 2023 compensation of our named executive officers as disclosed in the Proxy Statement for this meeting. Thank you, Carlotta. This concludes our formal business for today. The 2024 annual meeting of the shareholders of Diamond Hill Investment Group is hereby adjourned. I will now ask Carlotta King to read a quick disclosure statement, and then I will turn the floor over to Heather Brilliant for a brief presentation to be followed by a question and answer period. Thanks, Scott. So certain of the matters which we are about to discuss regarding, among other things, the company's future performance and our expectations for the future constitute forward-looking statements. These are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results may differ materially from the forward-looking statements due to the risk factors described in our annual report on Form 10-K for 2023. So with that, I will turn it over to Heather Brilliant for her management briefing, please. Thank you, Scott and Carlotta. I'm very pleased to be here today to represent what is going on with Diamond Hill's business. So I'd like to just dive into the presentation we have for you today. This is a written version of the Safe Harbor Statement that Carlotta just shared with you that we, of course, need to include in our slides for your reference. So I wanted to just start out by talking a little bit about our foundation. We several years ago made very clear that at Diamond Hill, what we're trying to do is to deliver great returns for our clients and provide an exceptional client experience. We put together some words around our mission, our vision, and our promise to clients to really embody this commitment. It's been the same. These three statements have been the same for the last several years, and I imagine they will be for long into the future because what we're trying to do as a firm is really very enduring. So let's talk a little bit more about what that is and what it means. So at Diamond Hill, we put clients at the center of everything we do. And you can see that represented on this graphic, which I have used in past years, so I'm sure it looks familiar. But you can see that represented by the dark blue clients circle that really does form the center of our foundational strategy. I wanna talk about a few areas that we are really committed to as a company in order to give you the understanding that at Diamond Hill, what we're trying to do is to focus on areas where we believe we have competitive advantages, where we think we can win for our clients. And so we do that really by focusing on four areas: our investment principles, our portfolio management capabilities, our alignment of interests, and our centralized infrastructure. So when it comes to our investment principles, we have been very foundational in defining what we believe to be the way to invest that we align with our clients around. And I'm gonna talk about this in a little bit more detail, on the next slide. But fundamentally, we believe in active management. We believe in valuation-oriented investing, and we believe in taking a long-term approach. We believe these things align with the way our clients are looking for us to invest. Just to give you an example, you know, we consider ourselves very long-term oriented with a focus on performance over at least five-year time horizons. Some of our clients have even longer time horizons than that and may be looking to us to outperform over many five-year time periods or even decades. And so it's just an example of where I believe our investment principles really help reinforce the alignment that I'll talk about in a minute. The second area I wanted to talk about that I think really forms far part of our competitive advantage is our portfolio management capabilities. And this is really an area that we have made tremendous investment in over the last, really over the history of Diamond Hill. And we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail. But I think it's really important to, to appreciate that originally, our capabilities here were very focused on US equity markets. And these are the areas that we've developed capabilities over 20+ years. In the last seven or eight years, we've also developed capabilities in fixed income and international equity that I'll talk to you about as well. And, investing in those portfolio management areas has been a really important part of what we've been trying to do on behalf of our shareholders. When it comes to our alignment of interests, there are many ways that we ensure that we stay aligned with clients. Now, I think every investment manager you could possibly look to or speak to would try to talk about how they align their interests with their clients. It is our job, fundamentally. The reason why I think Diamond Hill stands apart in this regard is because of all of the different ways that we reinforce that alignment. First of all, we strategically manage capacity in order to ensure that we're putting our ability to generate excess returns above our ability to generate revenue. That one decision alone is so fundamental that almost every other investment manager out there is not willing to make that commitment. A second thing we do is we have a very thoughtful philosophy around fees, where we're trying to make sure that we're capturing a fair share of the economics relative to what we see, our ability to generate excess returns for our clients. So ultimately, we know when we set our fees that we're really keeping three constituents in mind very explicitly. Our clients, first and foremost, trying to deliver to them as much excess return as we possibly can. Our shareholders, all of you, as people who are providing the funding for us to exist as a business. And our employees because we need to be able to retain and invest in the talent that we know we need in order to be able to deliver these excess returns. Another way we ensure alignment of interests that I think is really differentiated is by looking at five-year rolling time periods when we are determining portfolio manager compensation. It is very hard to find an investment manager that does not consider one-year or three-year time periods when evaluating portfolio managers. That is something that I think is truly distinct and really reinforces that commitment to the long term that I mentioned before. The other thing I'd mention here too is our long-term orientation. Now, I talked about that a little bit under investment principles, but really being aligned with our clients and trying to have time periods that are aligned with what our clients are trying to accomplish, I think, really keeps us on the same page with trying to achieve client outcomes. Now, just to give you some data points or hard evidence to back up this alignment of interests, we have approximately $200 million invested in our strategies as employees of Diamond Hill. We also have about 19% employee and director ownership of Diamond Hill stock. So between both of these, we really feel that our policies that I talked about a moment ago, as well as our actions that you can see in this data, demonstrate that we are incredibly focused on being truly aligned with our clients. The final area here that I wanted to mention that I think forms part of our competitive advantage as a business is our centralized infrastructure. Now, when we talk about centralized infrastructure, we're really talking about everything, everything we do to serve our clients that goes beyond our investment teams. This includes our client-facing teams, and it also includes all of our operational teams. The reason why we centralize these is manifold. But just to give you a couple of examples, first, we think it leads to a better client experience. Our clients do not have multiple touchpoints just because they might be invested in our long-short strategy and our large-cap strategy, for example. They don't have a different touchpoint if they're also invested in fixed income. And so making sure that we have really focused on the client's experience and the relationship that we have with them, I think, is one of the reasons why having a centralized focus here makes a really big difference. The second is it allows us to avoid repetitive costs. You're able to really stay focused on, providing the solutions that our clients need without needing to repeat areas, in order to provide the solutions across US equity, international equity, and fixed income. The third thing I'd say that I think is a really powerful part of our competitive advantage is that this focus has enabled us to build deep relationships with many of the home offices of RIAs, wirehouses, broker-dealers across the marketplace. And these deep relationships give us broad ability to place our strategies where our clients will be able to access them. This is something that is getting increasingly hard for investment managers to accomplish. And having built these long-term relationships and focused on those relationships with the the direct client and also the end client, I think, has really formed a fundamental part of our competitive advantage as a business. So let's move on to our shared investment principles. Now, if you are familiar with Diamond Hill, and I know all of you are, you are very familiar with these investment principles. So I won't spend too much time here, but I did want to emphasize that these investment principles really form the foundation of how we think about investing for our clients but also how we think about running the firm. And so I just wanted to touch on each one briefly and tie it to not only how we think about investing but also how we run the firm. From the first one on here is having an active fundamental approach. We believe in active management. It does permeate every strategy we have, and it always will. It's something that we're gonna talk about in a little bit because there's obviously been a lot of industry headwinds in this regard. But we are completely committed to active management and believe it is the right answer for our clients. From an ownership standpoint, we really bring an ownership mentality to both how we invest and how we run the firm. We think like owners when we're making decisions about both of those areas, and we do the due diligence to build long-term conviction and be able to give us the conviction to wait when it seems like we have more headwinds than tailwinds to be able to make the decisions that we believe are right for our company and our clients over the long term. We also hold our positions longer than competitors. You can see it in the data if you look at our strategies. I think that's another piece of evidence of how we really think like long-term owners when we're making investment decisions. Next, our focus on the long term really aligns our interests with those of our clients. I talked about that a little bit already, so I won't go into that in too much more detail. Our valuation discipline is critical to how we invest and how we run the business. It is, we really believe the best way to compound returns is to take a ownership stake in a business that we believe is trading at a discount to what we think it's worth and have the patience to hold it until those values converge. And that is also fundamental to the way we think about investing and also really permeates not only, our investment decisions on the equity side but also in fixed income as well, where we're really thinking about the relative value of the bonds that we're investing in. I would also say too, when we're talking about valuation, it applies to the discipline that we apply to our buyback program, where we only buy back our shares when we believe they're trading at a discount to intrinsic value. The final thing on this side, our strategic capacity management, is something I touched on before, but it is very fundamental because it protects our ability in the long term to generate great returns for our clients. So it's something that we will always be strategic about and very thoughtful about when we think about the amount of assets that we can successfully manage for our clients. So I wanna talk a little bit about some of the industry trends that we've been facing. These are not specific to Diamond Hill, but I do think it's really important, you know, as shareholders of Diamond Hill to understand some of the backdrop in the and the landscape in the industry. So what this chart shows, essentially, is the white-blue bars that are kind of above the zero line show inflows into passive every single year over the last decade. And the blue bars, the dark blue bars below the line, show the outflows from active, which have been almost consistent across that period. You can see two years where active management did experience inflows. But overall, we're seeing a very tough environment for active. And I think there's a bunch of different potential takeaways you could take from this slide. First is that the challenges that we're facing with investors moving to passive investments are not new. They are not something that have just occurred in the last few years. They've been going on actually longer than this chart even shows. So the last decade, I think, has been particularly tough, as you can see here. But we know we all know from being in this industry that the movement towards passive has been going on for a lot longer than this. The second thing that I think is important to take away from it is that, it has started to gain momentum, it feels like, in the last couple of years. You've seen the last two years, 2022 and 2023, on here showing very meaningful outflows from active. And I think that's something that we have certainly felt as an industry, and we've seen as a headwind. The third thing I wanted to mention is that this move by investors has been completely rational. Over the last decade, we have seen a high concentration in the market where the top 10 stocks have meaningfully outperformed the market. That is the only decade that this has happened over the last 60 years. So we are kind of at the, we're at the nadir of what has been a very challenging trend for really active management in general. It's not the only challenge that we've faced. You can see here the big circles on this chart show fundamental active equity and fundamental active fixed income are really the largest parts of the market but and the parts of the market where we primarily participate. But what you can see on this slide also is that those have been shrinking in favor of people moving not only to passive, which you can see on this slide, but also moving to specialist strategies and to private assets and specialty assets. So this is a challenge for our industry as well, but it also forms the foundation of an opportunity. And I wanna talk a little bit more about that. So, from a challenge perspective, you know, not only have we been seeing our clients and all the clients in the industry really shift more to passive and look to, you know, passive to lower their fees and private equity or private credit to bring them excess returns, but we're also seeing that trend accelerate over the last few years. And we're seeing a lot of our competitors try to move into those spaces, launching private assets, and, you know, moving into spaces where I think the competition will get increasingly tough. The other trend that we've seen that, you know, you can't really see directly on this slide but is kind of an indirect embedded reality on this slide is that it's been a really tough environment for mutual funds. And so, you know, when I got to Diamond Hill, about five years ago, we had almost 70% of our revenue in mutual funds. We were a mutual fund company. And that's something we've done a lot of work to diversify. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But that is for very good reason because mutual funds face a very challenging environment that goes along partially with investors moving to these other asset classes where mutual funds might not be the ideal vehicle. It also goes along with the challenging tax status that mutual funds provide to some clients. These headwinds, I'd say, between a shift to passive, shift to private assets, and a shift away from mutual funds have been real headwinds for not only our entire industry but also specifically for Diamond Hill. What does this really mean for us? It means we need to focus on our ability to deliver for clients. As I said at the beginning, this really comes down to two primary areas of focus. We need to deliver great investment results for our clients and a differentiated, exceptional client experience. If we can get those two things right, we know we can win. What you can still see on this slide is that even though fundamental active equity and fundamental active fixed income are smaller than they were, there are still enormous categories, enormous. And we are a very small player. And so we don't have to be the asset manager for everybody in order to win. We have to be the asset manager for our clients. And we really focus on creating long-term partnerships with clients who want what we have. And I just wanna emphasize one more point on this, which is that our intention is to stay laser-focused on the areas we have competitive advantages. So I went through that already, on the earlier slide talking a little bit about why we believe we have competitive advantages in US equity, international equity, and fixed income. We do not believe we have competitive advantages in private equity or private credit. And so those are areas where we're not trying to compete with our competitors moving into that space. In fact, we think it is a slight advantage to us that so many other people are trying to compete there because they're not as focused on competing in fundamental active equity and fundamental active fixed income, which is giving us an opportunity to win. So over the last couple of years, you can see on this slide that our revenue has not been immune from these trends. And so, you know, especially when you see those incredible headwinds of outflows from active equity, it's been really hard for any active manager to succeed over the last couple of years. I feel pretty happy, actually, about the amount that we've been able to hold in there given these headwinds. We've been doing it by making meaningful investments in our business, which I'll talk about in a little bit as well. The other thing I'd say here is that there really are a couple of different pieces to our revenue and asset trends. So just to make sure everyone is clear about what we're looking at, the green line at the bottom shows our average assets under management and advisement in billions. You can see that in 2023, our average assets under management and advisement was $27 billion. That was a decline from $30 billion in 2022. Over that same time period, our revenue, excluding performance fees, declined from $153 million to $136 million. So part of this is the reality that we have experienced some outflows, especially in active equity, as I mentioned. But part of it also is actually some success in improving the diversification of our business, where we might not have the same fee per assets under management, but we feel increasingly confident about our ability to deliver over the long run for shareholders given the strengths that we're building in these areas outside of mutual funds. So, one thing I would mention too, which we are going to cover at the end, is while our average assets were $27 billion in 2023, as it shows on this slide, we ended the year at $29 billion in assets under management and advisement. And, we at the first quarter, we ended the first quarter at $32 billion in assets under management and advisement. So we'll talk a little bit more about the quarter, at the end. But I just wanted to mention that we feel like this, this really does demonstrate the resilience that we're building into our business. So let's talk a little bit more specifically about that. On this slide, we are demonstrating the shift in our business to growing in areas outside of mutual funds. So you can see at the bottom of these of each of these bars, the, green shows how much of our assets under management are in mutual funds. And it's been reasonably steady. There's a little bit of volatility in there, with 2021 being a very strong year and, you know, 2022 giving some of that back. But overall, we see a pretty steady, amount of assets under management in Diamond Hill funds. That's great because we don't wanna diversify by shrinking part of our business. We wanna diversify by growing in new areas. That's really what you see on this chart. So, if you look at 2023, which is the second-to-last bar, or we also added the first quarter to this slide, March 31st, 2024, you can see that we have been growing across our separately managed accounts businesses, our sub-advised businesses, and also model delivery, and importantly, our collective investment trusts. So we have basically launched all of these vehicles in response to client demand, in partnership with clients, in order to be able to deliver our strategies in the vehicles that our clients are most interested in. So let's talk a little bit about our flows. That is what's shown on this chart. While I think you can see on here from the gold bar that or the gold line, I should say, that our net flows have been mixed, where you have some years where we have accomplished positive net flows. We definitely have some years on here where we have not. I think the most important thing to take away from here is that the green bar below the zero line shows our equity outflows. Those have been pretty consistent. We can't really move the needle on equity outflows until we diversify further away from mutual funds because across the industry, mutual funds have very meaningful rates of turnover. We know that. We experience it too. We are very proud when we're able to keep our rates of turnover below industry average. But the reality is that there is more turnover among mutual funds than there are among other vehicles. What we do see on here is that it's the years where our inflows exceed our outflows that really make the difference. So being able to generate more inflows makes a meaningful difference to our total net flow picture. And that might seem like a very obvious thing to say. But the reason I mention it is because, you know, in 2022 and part of 2023, we had closed our large-cap strategy. So we were essentially not taking new clients on purpose because we felt like that was the right thing to do for our clients. So while, of course, we always want our net flow picture to be positive, sometimes it's not positive for the right reasons. And that's really what we feel like we, what we can see on here. So, over the course of, you know, researching all of these industry trends, we came across a couple of key areas of focus that we really think are fundamental for any investment manager to be able to succeed in the next decade. And these are, investing in growth, modernizing our operating model, and increasing financial discipline. And these are not specific to Diamond Hill. I really don't think there is an investment management business out there that can succeed without doing these three things. And, that's reinforced by the fact that we came across both of these or all three of these areas of focus in research from firms like Casey Quirk and Morgan Stanley. Oliver Wyman had put out reports that were very consistent with these themes. We know this is true for Diamond Hill as well. We were actually really pleased to see this industry research because we feel like these are areas that we've already been focusing on. We're increasing our focus in these areas as well. First, investing in growth. So for many, this really means looking for tailwinds. As I mentioned before, we see our competitors looking to private equity, looking to areas where there's market growth that they can benefit from. For us, investing in growth is about investing where we have competitive advantages, where we believe we can deliver for our clients in the long term. And so that means that we are doubling down on our amazing strategies that we're basically doubling down on the strategies we've built in US equity. We're increasing our investments in fixed income. And we're increasing our investments in international equity. And I'll talk a little bit about that in more detail. When it comes to modernizing our operating model, I think it's really important to remember that, having the right operating model has a lot to do with the kind of business that you have. And so over the last 20 years, Diamond Hill had the perfect operating model for the business that it had. It was essentially a mutual fund business focused on U.S. equity. So the need to modernize our operating model comes partially from industry changes. We know the world has changed when it comes to the use of data and technology and the ability to be more efficient using these tools to our advantages. But we also know that for Diamond Hill specifically, our business is now much broader than mutual funds. As I mentioned, we are in separate accounts. We're in CITs. We're looking at new vehicles every day to make sure we can meet client needs. We also know that we're diversifying from being focused entirely on U.S. equity to really increasing our focus on delivering in fixed income and international equity, areas of the market that have additional elements of complexity that we need to be able to meet for our clients. We initiated in 2023 a review of our operating model and have come up with a plan to make sure we have the right operating model for the future. We're starting to make investments here. We're really excited about essentially getting ahead of what we believe the future will look like so that we will be ready to deliver for clients as these areas of our business continue to grow. Finally, increasing financial discipline. Now, I think this is an area that Diamond Hill has done pretty well historically. I think we've been very careful and judicious with our use of assets and our decisions to make investments across the firm. But I also think it's really important that, to recognize that over the last decade, even while we as an industry have faced headwinds when it comes to flows, we've faced tailwinds when it comes to market movements. And that's led to an ability to, be less cost-conscious across the industry. And so I think we will increasingly see our competitors take a bigger focus on being cost-conscious. For us, increasing financial discipline really means investing in our ability to analyze different parts of our business, to really have the tools necessary to understand when we're making investments, how are these delivering for our shareholders, over what time period do we expect them to deliver, and being as communicative as possible both internally and externally about that. And so I think, I think it's an area of increasing opportunity for us as well. So those are kind of generally high-level what we're thinking about. Let me dive in a little bit more specifically to our objectives for 2024 and beyond. So when it comes to the first point on here, our goal is to continue to invest in building best-in-class fixed income and equity capabilities. We have been doing that for many years. Just to give a couple of examples, in 2022, we hired a new director of research from Harris Associates who's been a great addition to our team. In 2023, we hired two senior analysts to join our team, that have also been adding a ton of value to our team. We're really pleased to be able to bring people in at this level of seniority. And then in 2024, we hired a new assistant PM to join our team as well. And we have launched a new intern and associate program to ensure we have a consistent flow of new investment talent coming in. and this is all on top of our very meaningful equity research team that supports our US equity strategies already and really provides us not only with the ability to have ongoing idea generation for these strategies but also a pipeline of talent for future senior analysts, portfolio managers, etc. In fixed income, we have been over the last, you know, seven years building a track record and building assets. And we're really excited to start to see some of the success of those investments. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a bit. But I do think it's important to keep in mind that when we start a new investment strategy, like going into fixed income when we brought this team on board, we are doing it with our ability to generate excess returns for clients and our competitive advantages as a business in mind. And we know that we have to do it with a minimum five-year time horizon because these types of investments do not pay off quickly. They pay off over very long periods of time. And we'll start to see that when we get to some of the fixed income details. But I just think it's really important to remember that, you know, as shareholders of Diamond Hill, we need to appreciate the importance of funding these new initiatives and that they do take quite a long time to pay off. So in the other area I'd mentioned just while we're talking about our investment capabilities is international equity, which I'll also touch on in a little bit more detail. But we now have a track record exceeding five years here. And our assets ended the year at a little bit over $100 million and have continued to grow since then. And so we're excited to see some signs of building the future there as well. Our second objective for 2024 is to pursue focused growth with aligned partners. And essentially, what this really means is that we are continuing to evolve our distribution strategy to align with our client needs and our strategies, and basically our ability to deliver for clients. So as many of you know from prior meetings, we have over the last few years invested meaningfully in our client-related data, technology, and our marketing abilities in order to be able to make sure that we're increasing our focus on the right clients. Make sure I stay on the right spot here, without falling over. So anyway, we have used this data, technology, and marketing to be able to ensure that we're reaching the right clients. And we are looking in 2024 to further leverage this data and our client relationships and what we've learned from all of this to be able to and also the product placement that I mentioned that we've accomplished with some of the wirehouses and broker-dealers to be able to focus on putting some resources behind reaching the advisors of wirehouses and independent broker-dealers. So this is a new area of focus for us as a company. We had historically really spent our time at the home offices of wirehouses and broker-dealers. Our focus from an advisor perspective had been with independent RIAs. We've had a lot of success there. We don't want to take our eye off the ball with those very meaningful clients. But we believe the time is right to be able to make some additional investments in our ability to also interact directly with the advisors at the wirehouses and broker-dealers. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. I have a little more detail on our distribution strategy coming up. The third area is to ensure our operating model meets our long-term needs. I touched on that a little bit before. It's really important that we have the operating model for the future. That's really the focus here. In 2024, we will be investing particularly in making sure we have all of the tools and data that we need for our research team in a research management system. We're also taking a fresh look at how we manage our data and technology across the entire firm. I would say this, looking at our operating model, is a multi-year endeavor. I would expect more communication about this as we move this project forward. But we're really excited about the progress that we're starting to see. Then finally, enhancing our culture and supporting our associates. I think you can all appreciate that making sure we have a culture that leads to people wanting to be here, to great investment outcomes, and to a team that's really energized and excited to work together is critical to what we do. I think we have done a really great job in that regard. But we never want to take our eye off the ball. So this year in particular, I'd say we're focused on making sure we have the right focus on excellence, on how we work together from a hybrid work model perspective, and making evolutions there where necessary, and really making sure that we're onboarding the senior talent that we've been hiring in a way that ensures that we can be successful in the long term. These investments are not free. You can see them coming through in our operating margin. And so, I do think that, you know, if you look at the dollars spent on our, you know, operating expenses over the last several years, it's a pretty consistent amount of dollars. The investments we're making are investments that we know we need to be making. And because we take such a long-term perspective, we make those investments even in years where our revenue does not give us the ability to make them as seamlessly. And that's a really important reality of who Diamond Hill is. We have to think with a long-term perspective in order to make the right decisions for our clients and for our shareholders. And in doing that, it means that we will see some fluctuations in our margin. And we're okay with that. So what you can see in the green line is our adjusted net operating profit margin, which was 30% last year. That is adjusted for the gains and losses that come from our deferred comp plan investments. We really focus on that green line and thinking about how we analyze the business because those fluctuations are not directly correlated to the way our business runs. It just makes things a little bit noisy. So it's very important to us that everybody understand, I should say, these investments in our industry show up as income statement investments. I mean, they show up basically as expenses on the income statement. That is the benefit and the curse of being a very capital-light business. I think we can all agree that having returns on invested capital as high as a business like ours can generate is a wonderful thing. We wouldn't want it any other way. But the downside of it means that when we make investments, they show up with a lower operating margin because there's no way for them to go through our balance sheet. And so, for the vast majority of our investments, they are investments in people. It's bringing on teams before we're generating sufficient revenue to cover the cost of the team. It's, you know, adding people that we believe can eventually bring in more clients. But we add the people before we add the clients. And so that's just the reality of the way our business works. And I think overall, it's such a good thing. But it does mean that we have to accept some variability in our operating margin. So one of the reasons we make investments like the ones I just described in our investment team is because we know that our primary objectives is to deliver great returns to clients over time. So this slide is kind of a new visualization but the same idea of trying to demonstrate to you all how we have performed relative to a couple of different benchmarks over time. And so on the right of the slide, you can see how we compare to value benchmarks. And there you can see that over most time periods, most of our strategies have generated positive alpha, which we're really proud of. And a lot of our clients look at us relative to value benchmarks. So we do think this is a really relevant way to think about how we add value to our clients. But on the left, you can see our ability to generate alpha relative to core. As we were discussing before, that's been a really tough environment for all active managers over the last decade. You can see that in our results too, where our ability to deliver alpha relative to core has been mixed. So it's something that we do believe we have to get right over the long term. We are confident that we can over the long term. You can see that in the very long term, you know, the 15- and 20-year numbers. Fortunately, most of our clients are really expecting us to deliver relative to a value benchmark, which is what you see on the right. We hold ourselves to the standard of also delivering relative to core. So I think that's really important. So I want to dive into fixed income and international in a little bit more detail, because these are such big areas of investment for us, as I mentioned before. So what you can see here is how is on the left, Short Duration Securitized Bond in blue and how that's performed to the Bloomberg Barclays index that we compare it to. And then on the right, how the Core Bond strategy has performed. And, essentially, what you could see here is that we have had very strong performance in fixed income over every time period, which really demonstrates to us the ability of this team to deliver alpha for clients. And so it gives us more confidence in making investments in this area that we will be successful in, you know, making big contributions to our clients' outcomes and our returns for shareholders in this area. From a flows perspective and an assets under management and advisement perspective, you can see how fixed income has grown over the last five years. And so essentially, we started when we launched fixed income with Core Bond and Short Duration Securitized Bond. And so those are the two blue and, you know, navy or black bars that you see starting in 2019 and continuing to grow as you go over to the right. But those aren't the only strategies that we have in fixed income. I consider those kind of our flagship strategies. They are the only strategies in mutual funds. And so they help create a track record for the team. And they help any investor see what we're capable of in fixed income. But what we have seen is that that leads to clients saying, "This is a great solution. But what we need is something a little bit more custom." And so you can see above those two bars, there's a few additional colors of bars, demonstrating the strategies that we've added as well as we've had client interest. And you see this more in fixed income where, you know, clients have specific needs that they need met that are not always exactly in line with what we're doing for that for other clients in core and short-duration securitized. And so this is something that we are very happy to do. We love seeing our business grow like this. And we would expect to see custom solutions like this for institutional clients continue to grow. Along those lines as well, I just wanted to mention how long a how long-term a perspective one needed to have in order to be confident in our ability to succeed in fixed income. We brought this team on about seven years ago. Even in 2019, after they'd been here for three years, we had just barely $1 billion under management. So, you know, in fixed income, you need a bit more than that for it to really be viable. And so we felt, because of the performance I showed you on the last slide, very confident in our team's ability to deliver for clients over the long run. And so we were very comfortable continuing to make that investment. And we are very proud of how we feel like it's really starting to pay off. The other thing I'd say is that we're very intentionally, proactively looking for new ways for our team to be able to deliver to clients for clients. And so, essentially, what we're doing is diving into areas where we believe we have differentiated capabilities and looking for new strategies that we can launch. And so, right now, we're working on a new strategy that is focused on less liquid securitized assets. And, we're looking into vehicles for that that would essentially match the profile of the underlying investments. So a mutual fund has daily liquidity. And so when you're looking at less liquid assets, we don't think that's the right vehicle. And, so we've been doing some work around that and, hope to be able to to launch that strategy later this year. So let me touch a little bit on international. Now, this is another example of our long-term commitment to building strategies that stand the test of time. Because if any of you are familiar with the international equity space, you know that it has been very unloved by investors for the better part of a decade. And, you know, for many, many investment firms, that might say, "Let's stay away. Let's not go into international because nobody wants international anyway." But to us, it says, "There's a long-term opportunity here. And we have the opportunity to start building this strategy now so that we have a track record when investors come back to this category." And that's what we're starting to see some signs of. So we put the team together a number of years ago. We now have more than a five-year track record. We think this track record demonstrates our team's ability to deliver excess returns for clients, which is, you know, really our ultimate goal. And so we're really excited about the work the team's been doing. We invested further in this area by hiring an investment specialist, which has led to increased interest from clients. And we ended the year at about $100 million under management, which is a big, a big milestone for a new strategy because it allows us to get placement on platforms who otherwise would not be willing to talk to us or take us on their platform. And the strategy's continued to grow since then. And it's at about $130 million as of the end of the first quarter. So I think you can all appreciate that performance is absolutely required in order for us to succeed as a firm. But it's it's table stakes. It's step one. It's not the only thing that's required. And the other thing that is absolutely critical is a differentiated, exceptional client experience. So we have made tremendous progress in this area. We've also made tremendous investments in this area. I just want to touch a little bit on what we're doing here and what we will continue to do as we move forward into the next couple of years. I mentioned earlier our increased adoption of data and our partnership between sales and marketing and really growing our ability to make marketing a strategic asset of our firm. That's really led to an increased ability for us to focus on partnership partnerships with highly aligned clients. That's always been our goal. But the more data we have around how our clients and prospects invest, the better we can partner with clients that we think take a long-term perspective, are looking for active managers, you know, want to invest in ways that we can offer them and partner with them on. So right now, we feel like the time is right to increase our investment in distribution. And that really is related to what I was saying before, where, you know, over the last five years, we have seen, improving performance across many strategies. We have five-year-plus track records in new areas like fixed income and international. We have been really successful in building relationships at the home offices of wirehouses and in independent broker-dealers so that we now feel like it is the right time to add to that team and to be able to directly interface with the advisors of the wirehouses and broker-dealers. The other area I just wanted to mention while we're talking about our distribution strategy is that we are very committed to institutional as well. You may recall from a year or two ago, we talked a little bit about how we were focusing on the institutional market. Institutional is a really good example, actually, of a market that is generally declining. There's not as much growth in institutional. For us, that's okay because we are so tiny in the institutional market that we can experience meaningful growth even if the category is experiencing a lot of change. So, when it comes to institutional, I'd say we're really focused on the areas where there are meaningful investments by institutions in categories we offer, like Core Bond, like international. We're also looking at finding some change in momentum there, I'd say, where over the last couple of years, the searches that have been going on in the institutional market have been very heavily focused on specialty areas. So if you have that specialty area, that's great. But if you don't, you can't really participate in the search. We're starting to see that change. We are starting to see institutions really rethink their commitment to their current managers. They've now seen how in Core Bond, for example, how their manager has performed over a multitude of environments. That's a real advantage for us because we have also been there over this multitude of environments. We've been able to deliver excess returns that are really compelling. So now that institutions have had a little bit of time to digest how the markets have changed, we think there's a real opportunity here. What we've been doing here is really aligning what we're doing in consultant relations with what we're doing in national accounts and bringing that together in a way that we think will give us the strategic focus on the institutional opportunities where we can be successful. Diamond Hill's been around for basically 24 years. Over that time period, our assets under management and advisement have grown very materially. That's really happened through a number of different milestones. Hopefully, these aren't too small for everybody to see. Essentially, you know, as we think about where we have been over this time period, I think this really demonstrates the tremendous growth that Diamond Hill has experienced and also a lot of the key milestones along the way. At almost any point in this history, it would have felt impossible for Diamond Hill to grow to the extent that we have seen it grow. You know, look at 2008. We had large caps surpassing $1 billion. Nobody at that time would have thought we could be a $20 billion firm, much less a $30 billion firm. I think that's a very natural reality when it comes to this industry where, you know, you accomplish success little by little, client relationship by client relationship. So that's really what we've done. That's really what we intend to continue to do, to stay focused on the areas where we believe we can deliver for clients and where we have a competitive advantage and to keep on delivering for our clients and our shareholders little by little over time. So, just to give you a couple of examples, in the last five years alone, we have seen several strategies' performance improve to top quartile performance. We have created dedicated CEO, CIO, and DOR roles so that our investment team can really focus on delivering great investment results. We have transformed ourselves from a mutual fund company to a diversified boutique focused on succeeding where we can deliver for clients. You know, we've grown fixed income assets under management from essentially a standing start to $4 billion under management. And we've invested in our marketing, data, and analytics in a meaningful way and taken a really strategic approach to distribution, just to name a couple of examples. These are all things we're really proud of. And they're all part of what's gotten us to this point. But it's not the end of the story. This slide demonstrates that we have more than $100 billion of capacity if we just keep doing what we're doing in the strategies that we offer today. And so I think it's really meaningful to see, you know, while we think of ourselves as being really big in US equity, with just the strategies we already have, we'd feel comfortable managing $50 billion in US equity. And in fixed income, we have a huge runway in front of us. You know, we're just getting started in international. So, so we have a tremendous runway there as well. I think this gives us a lot of confidence that we want to make the investments that we're making because we know we can deliver for our clients. We know we have the capacity to do it. The other thing I would just say about capacity is that this is the capacity assuming the strategies we have today. To the extent that we do keep innovating, adding new areas of capability, you know, within areas like fixed income and international, that will add additional capacity in the future. So we're really excited about what we have in front of us. On that note, I just wanted to mention too, over this time period when we've been making these meaningful investments in our business, we have also been meaningfully returning capital to shareholders. I think that's a really important reality to remember as well. So, too, now, I think you all know that our capital allocation priorities are pretty clear. I just wanted to reiterate them to make sure we're all on the same page. Our number one objective when it comes to how we think about the use of capital is to make sure we have enough cash to run the business in any market environment. We do always ensure that as our first step. The second thing we do is we make sure we have enough capital to seed new strategies and to seed existing strategies where that is helpful in getting them to key milestones and things like that. That's been a critical area for us so that we can enable future growth. Our third priority is to repurchase our shares when they're trading at a discount to intrinsic value. And so you can see on here that, over the last couple of years, we have meaningfully invested in share repurchases as we have believed that our shares are trading at a discount. And, that's a great way for us to be able to efficiently return capital to shareholders. And then finally, we consider dividends. And you all know that we pay a quarterly dividend now, of $1.50 per quarter. And that's an increase. We started out in, I think it was 2022, at $1 per quarter. Was it 2022? '21. 2021 started at $1 and moved that up to $1.50 per quarter, so $6 a year. And then the final thing is that we do consider whether we would pay a special dividend if all of those are accomplished and we still have excess cash. And so what you can see on here from the dotted line that shows our net income is that really for the last five years, we have been paying we have been returning to shareholders more than our net income. And that is by design. We were doing that because the years prior that aren't on here, we had been returning less than our net income. But what we would like to see is for those things to be approximately even over time. And so we're, you know, we decided in 2023 not to pay a special dividend for all of those reasons. And we really feel good about how we're allocating capital and where we believe we can generate excess returns over the long run. So let me touch oh, and over this time period too, I should mention, we did reduce our share count by 20%. We had about 3.5 million shares outstanding at the beginning of the period, ended this period on here, so the end of 2023, with about 2.8 million outstanding, as Carlotta reported on earlier. And so I think that's, that's been a meaningful investment as well. So let me touch a little bit on the first quarter. This slide shows our revenue in green and our average assets under management and advisement in black. And so you can see from this that in the first quarter, we saw some meaningful improvements in revenue and assets under management and advisement. I think it's really, it's something that we're, of course, pleased to see. But, one quarter does not make a trend. So we definitely wanted to share this with you but wanted to do so with that context. And we are continuing to see some of the trends that we talked about before where, while our assets under management and advisement were up about 10%, our revenue in this period was up about 7%. That's partially a continuation of the mix that I talked about into different vehicles. And, it's but I do think that, you know, seeing this meaningful improvement, which also we saw in our, strategies' performance, really was bolstered by the fact that we saw the market broaden out. So the top 10 stocks did not dominate the market in the first quarter, which I think is a really great sign of what our business is capable of when we start to see the benefits of active management come back to the market. On from a margin perspective, we saw, so as I mentioned before, we focus on adjusted net operating profit margin, which is adjusted for the gains and losses of our deferred compensation plan investments. And so that's the green line on here. So you can see that our first quarter margin was 32%. And that's really a, I think, a reasonable place for it to have landed given the continued investments that we're making coupled with some improvement in the revenue trend as we discussed on the last slide. So finally, I just wanted to end with, you know, essentially the idea that our history has been one that we're really proud of. But it felt very difficult at every step of the way, just like it does right now. So we know there's a lot of industry headwinds. We know that there are things that we have to overcome as a firm. But we're really excited about our ability to be able to do so. We feel like our strategies, our delivering for clients, our teams are committed to doing what's right to make sure our clients have an excellent client experience. And between those and making sure we have the right operating model and culture for the future, we're really excited about where we stand, so. With that, I will open it up to questions. Okay. Yeah. So the question is, can we expand on why we are not interested in moving into private equity and why we think that's a competitive advantage? I do think that private equity is here to stay. There's no question in my mind. I hope no one takes it as anything other than full acknowledgment that, you know, the private equity market is, is becoming more and more meaningful. The reason why we're not interested in pursuing it is because it's not an area where we believe we can provide something unique to clients that other private equity managers aren't already providing. For us, if we can't do something with a, you know, unique edge that gives our clients something they can't get elsewhere, we don't think it's worth doing. So I also think that there are some signs in the market that the tailwind that private equity has experienced could be, could be a little bit less of a tailwind in the future. But that's not really part of our decision-making. We're really focused on delivering for clients where we have a competitive advantage. And we have analyzed private equity in that regard. And we concluded that it's not an area that we feel we can do something differentiated. So the question is, we've seen rising interest in active ETFs. Is this something that Diamond Hill is considering? So, we are very focused on providing our investment strategies in any vehicle that our client is interested in. The challenge we have faced when looking at ETFs is that there's really no way to limit capacity in an ETF today. It's possible at some point that could change. We don't have any inherent problem with ETFs. I think I could see why some investors think it's a really useful vehicle. It's something we'll continue to explore. But we would need to be able to solve for the challenge that we wouldn't be able to constrain capacity. And you can see that in some, you know, very well-known, popular ETFs and how volatile their asset base has been because they're not able to decline taking new investors. And so for us, our ability to deliver those excess returns is the most important thing. We'll keep looking into it because I do think it's been an area of great growth. But for right now, we have decided not to go in that area. All right. Well, thank you all very much for coming to our annual shareholder meeting. And with that, we will wrap things up. We appreciate all of your time. Thank you.