ARTISAN PARTNERS ASSET MANAGEMENT INC. Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Artisan Partners Asset Management Business Update and Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Artisan Partners Asset Management. Please go ahead. Welcome to the Artisan Partners Asset Management Business Update and Earnings Call.

Today's call will include remarks from Jason Gottlieb, CEO, and C.J. Daley, CFO. Following these remarks, we will open the line for questions. Our latest results and investor presentation are available on the investor relations section of our website. Before we begin today, I would like to remind you that comments made during today's call, including responses to questions, may include forward-looking statements. These are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, the factors set forth in our earnings release and detailed in our SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from those disclosed in the statement, and we assume no obligation to update or revise any of these statements following the presentation.

In addition, some of our remarks today will include references to non-GAAP financial measures. You can find reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in the earnings release and supplemental materials, which can be found on our investor relations website. Also, please note nothing on this call constitutes an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell an interest in any Artisan investment product or a recommendation for any investment service. I will now turn it over to Jason.

Thank you for joining the call today. Our purpose at Artisan Partners remains unchanged: to generate and compound wealth for our clients over the long term. That purpose continues to guide every aspect of our business. We believe our autonomous investment team model, combined with a disciplined business management and thoughtful long-term growth initiatives, differentiates Artisan Partners and creates durable value for clients and shareholders alike. The second quarter demonstrated the resilience of that business model. We delivered record quarter-end assets under management, strong investment performance across much of the platform, continued growth in credit and alternatives, and another quarter of attractive financial performance despite continued headwinds in several equity strategies. As we have discussed, we are building a diversified global investment platform focused on producing attractive long-term growth across market cycles. The results this quarter reinforce that strategy.

Strong investment performance continues to create opportunities for growth, particularly as clients increasingly seek differentiated active managers. Long-term investment performance remains strong across our platform, with 86% of our AUM outperforming their benchmarks over three years, 77% over five years, and 99% over 10 years, gross of fees. The 12 Artisan strategies with track records over 10 years have compounded capital at average annual rates between 6% and 13%. Since inception, their average annual rates of return have, in the aggregate, exceeded their benchmarks by an average of 189 basis points annually, net of fees. The investment performance of our equity strategies improved meaningfully over the one and three-year time horizons, with 81% of our AUM outperforming their benchmarks over one year and 84% over three years, gross of fees. During the quarter, global equity markets rebounded sharply before volatility returned in June.

Our investment teams navigated well, generating more than $20 billion of returns for our clients. Turning to slide four. We continually evaluate our investment franchises against both client demand and long-term economic viability. As previously announced, following the loss of two large sub-advisory mandates in the U.S. value business, we concluded the prudent decision was to wind down the U.S. value team and redeploy resources toward areas where we see substantially greater long-term opportunity. The U.S. value franchise has been an important part of Artisan Partners for nearly 30 years, and we are extremely proud of what the team has accomplished for clients and shareholders during that time. We expect the wind down to be largely completed by the end of the third quarter, and CJ will describe the financial impact during his remarks. Including the U.S. value outflows, net client outflows totaled $10.5 billion during the quarter.

Approximately $9.2 billion, or nearly 90%, of the total net outflows came from the U.S. value and growth teams, with $6.4 billion from U.S. value and $2.8 billion from growth. We continue to diversify our platform and execute on growth opportunities. Credit strategies generated nearly $700 million of net inflows, representing our 16th consecutive quarter of positive organic growth and a 15% annualized organic growth rate. Alternative strategies have gathered approximately $300 million of net inflows, representing a 25% annualized organic growth rate and positive organic growth in five of the last six quarters. Within equities, we secured a $1 billion global discovery institutional mandate, and our sustainable emerging market strategy continues to attract meaningful new client capital.

Throughout the history of Artisan Partners, we have evolved the platform while remaining true to the principles that have defined the firm since its founding: high value-added investing, talent-driven strategies, and alignment with long-term asset allocations. Consistent with these principles, we have successfully added new investment teams, expanded into attractive asset classes, and increased the capabilities of our existing investment franchises. EMsights Capital Group demonstrates that strategy in action. This quarter marks the four-year anniversary of EMsights Capital Group. In four years, the team has built a distinctive business spanning three investment strategies, combining emerging markets debt expertise with sophisticated derivative capabilities to deliver differentiated investment solutions for clients. Today, the team manages more than $5 billion of assets, supported by strong investment performance and growing client demand. We believe EMsights remains in the early stages of its growth opportunity.

Looking ahead, we see meaningful potential to continue expanding the business through additional investment vehicles and broader distribution. EMsights demonstrates what our platform is designed to do: identify exceptional investment talent, provide the resources and autonomy to succeed, and build enduring investment franchises that create long-term value for clients and shareholders. We are now applying that same long-term approach to Grandview Property Partners. Like EMsights, Grandview expands our platform into an attractive area of long-term client demand while preserving the autonomy that allows great investment talent to thrive. Since completing the acquisition of Grandview earlier this year, the investment team has maintained their distinctive investment philosophy, process, and leadership. We are laying the foundation for Grandview's next phase of growth.

We are making good progress on the launch of their new flagship fund, including advanced discussions with an anchor institutional investor and active engagement with many of the limited partners that supported Grandview's prior funds. We recently hired a dedicated business leader to accelerate fundraising and expand institutional investor relationships. While it's early, we are encouraged by their progress to date and are excited for the opportunities ahead. We look ahead, we see meaningful opportunities across the investment platform. We are preparing to launch additional vehicles to meet evolving client demands, expanding our credit capabilities, advancing Grandview's next phase of growth, and continuing to invest behind exceptional investment talent. Combined with our strong balance sheet and active pipeline of opportunities, we believe we're well positioned to drive long-term growth. We're excited about the opportunities ahead. I will now turn the call over to CJ to discuss our financial results.

Thanks, Jason. Our complete GAAP and adjusted results are detailed in our earnings release. Assets under management ended the quarter at $183 billion, a record quarter end level, and an increase of 6% from the March quarter and 5% from a year ago. Average assets under management were $182 billion, flat sequentially and up 9% compared to the June 2025 quarter. Year-to-date average AUM improved 9% over the prior six-month period. Revenues for the quarter were $308 million, up 2% from the March quarter, primarily reflecting one additional day during the quarter and a modest increase in our average fee rate. Compared to the June 2025 quarter, revenue increased 9%, driven by higher average assets under management. Our weighted average fee rate for the quarter was 68 basis points, up from the March quarter, primarily due to the loss of the U.S. Value team mandates. Adjusted operating expenses declined 1% from the March quarter, primarily reflecting lower seasonal expenses and reduced long-term incentive compensation, offset in part by employee separation costs, including those associated with the wind down of the U.S.

Value team. Looking ahead, the September quarter will be negatively impacted by approximately $0.03 per share compared to the second quarter as a result of the wind down of the U.S. Value team. Additionally, fixed expenses are expected to decline in the September quarter due to continued roll-off of seasonal expenses and a decline in employee separation costs. Fixed expense guidance has not changed for the year. Compared to the prior year quarter, adjusted operating expenses increased 7%, driven primarily by higher variable incentive compensation associated with increased revenues. As a result, adjusted operating increased 8% sequentially to $101.4 million.

Adjusted operating margin expanded 180 basis points to 32.9%, and adjusted earnings per share increased to $0.94. Compared to the second quarter of 2025, adjusted operating income increased 13%. Margin expanded 120 basis points, and adjusted EPS increased 13%, highlighting the operating leverage inherent in our business model. Looking at the year-to-date results, average assets under management increased 9% compared to the first half of last year, driving a 9% increase in revenue. Year-to-date adjusted operating expenses increased 9% from 2025, primarily from higher incentive compensation on elevated revenues. Adjusted operating income increased 10% to $195.6 million. Adjusted operating margin improved to 32%, and adjusted earnings per share increased 9% to $1.81. In our non-GAAP measures, non-operating income includes only interest income and expense. Our balance sheet remains strong with $335 million of cash.

During the second quarter, we redeemed approximately $20 million of seed capital, reducing seed investments on the balance sheet to approximately $100 million. Proceeds from seed capital redemptions are included in cash available for corporate purposes, reinvestment, or potential return to shareholders through our year-end special dividend. Consistent with our dividend policy, our board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.80 per share for the June 2026 quarter, representing a 4% increase from the prior quarter and a 10% increase year-over-year. After funding the quarterly dividend, we retain over $180 million of excess capital to support organic growth initiatives, evaluate potential M&A opportunities or return to shareholders. That concludes my prepared remarks. I will now turn the call back to the operator.

At this time, we'll begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star and then one using a touch-tone telephone. We do ask that you please pick up the handset if you are using a speakerphone to ensure the best sound quality. In the interest of time, we do ask that you please limit yourselves to two questions. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two. Once again, that is star and then one to join the question queue. We'll pause momentarily to assemble the roster. Our first question today comes from Kenneth Lee from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead with your question.

Hey, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. Just from a high level, during the quarter, as you've been talking to the clients, wonder if you could just characterize overall client appetite for emerging markets, and global risk assets, more recently. Thanks. Hi, Ken. Yes. We have seen a really strong demand for EM.

They're looking for not only access to the asset class, but certainly they're looking for differentiated capabilities, and we're seeing that flow through more specifically to our sustainable emerging markets team. They've had a couple of good quarters of strong net new inflow, growth. I believe for the quarter, they were up about 235, and for the year, they're sort of double that. The pipeline of activity, specifically in EM is robust. Pipelines need to be crystallized, but we are happy with what we're seeing there. I'd say more generally across global risk assets, specifically equity, there's maybe a slightly more cautious tone. We've seen a fair bit of rebalancing. I look at the top Separately Managed Accounts, which are institutionally focused, just to see what kind of activity we're experiencing.

Naturally, there's benefit payments and adjustments. We saw a pretty broad-based rebalancing activity across a number of our largest relationships. Nothing meaningful on an isolated basis, but when you sort of add it all up, it becomes relatively meaningful. We are still seeing good opportunities in international. David, in the international value pipeline continues to be quite robust and strong across our global franchises, and global strategies. We're seeing good interaction with clients. I think where it tends to push people is they're tend to looking a little bit more across credit. They're tending to look for more goal or income-oriented strategies, and they're tending to focus a little bit more time and effort and attention on alternatives where they can get, again, a differentiated return that might complement their current or existing equity portfolio that's done obviously very well coming out of COVID.

Got you. Very helpful there. Just one follow-up, if I may. Wonder if you could share your latest thoughts around any kind of outlook around potential platform expansion opportunities. Thanks. Yeah. I'll highlight a few areas of expansion.

I think there are two clear initiatives that we have. The first one is we're going to continue to focus our time, effort, and attention in the areas where we see that overlap between asset allocation demand where we believe alpha is prevalent and where we think the talent is available. Where we're really seeing a good source of opportunity and pipeline is certainly in credit. We think that there's good possibilities and opportunities for expansion more globally to our credit platform and franchise. The second is within alternatives. There's a couple of areas that we've talked about in the past, but I'll highlight one maybe that we spent a little less time on in the world of hedged equity. Equity long-short in particular with more of a focus bias to it.

We've been sourcing and identifying really interesting talent within that sphere of the market. We've seen a pretty meaningful uptick in the demand for hedged equity, which for the first time in a long time is starting to bear itself out in terms of actual implementation and allocations. Those are two clear areas that we're focused on. As we've discussed in the past, areas in private markets such as equity secondaries, and real assets via either infrastructure or even a more global real estate to complement and sit within or alongside the Grandview Property Partners are also areas that we've been active in. They're coming, as you would expect, in both forms.

Certainly willing and interested in looking at lift outs, which is our bread and butter, but we're also considering inorganic opportunities for growth where we see that really first or second generation of talent that we can partner with and align ourselves and the firm alongside our clients to potentially bring a new team on. The second piece that we talked a little bit about that's been a strategic initiative is just the broadening the aperture of the vehicles. Trying to get in between and find the intersection between where and how our clients want to implement some of our existing strategies, and provide them the easier way to access that. That can come in many different forms. We've talked about SMAs, we've talked about models.

There's likely going to be something that we can envision an interval-based or oriented product that gives us the ability to do a hybrid between public and private securities, and certainly more private funds. As I'm sure you've seen, we did file for exemptive relief in the world of ETFs. We've received that relief. We have not announced, or we haven't determined when or what we are going to be launching within ETFs, but we certainly recognize that is an area that many of our clients are focused on implementation. We need to be thoughtful about how that would work with our existing investment teams and strategies and franchises.

That's clearly an area and a path for us to continue to broaden out the aperture and utilize our existing platform in a way that I think our clients are more increasingly looking to access us.

Great. Very helpful there. Thanks again.

Our next question comes from Bill Katz from TD Cowen. Please go ahead with your questions.

Okay, thank you. First one's really just a set of clarifications. Just want to make sure I understand the math. You mentioned that the wind down will cost $0.03 sequentially. Is that related to the fundamentals of the business, and that's just the timing of that? Does that also include the wind down that you're expecting for the remaining assets? You also mentioned that your fixed expenses would be down sequentially, reflecting both seasonality as well as less severance costs. Can you just sort of quantify the severance costs in the quarter so we have a better sense of that? Thank you. Yeah. Sure, Bill.

On your first question, the $0.03 is the delta between the second quarter and what we expect in the third quarter. We had a slight accretive nature to the U.S. Value team in the second quarter, given the wind down started midway. In the third quarter, we expect a very minimal loss before it evens out. That $0.03 is a differential between the second quarter, this quarter's results, and what you would expect next quarter. With respect to the costs, in the first quarter, we have larger number of seasonal expenses, which the decline in the second quarter was partially offset by the costs related to the wind down of the U.S. Value team, including severance, as well as some other expenses related to the wind down.

In the third quarter, we would expect to see the absence of those separation costs and wind down expenses and continued roll-off of the seasonal expenses. There is still a little bit more to go. All of that we'll see compared to the second quarter, we'll see a benefit in fixed expenses related to those items. Our guidance for the year, mid-single digits is what I said it in January, excluding the addition of Grandview and the long-term incentive comp expense we guided for the year. We still expect that to be mid-single digits, even with the additional costs of the wind down.

Thank you. That's very helpful. Maybe a big picture question. You mentioned in your prepared comments, just the opportunity to leverage the EM platform and then sort of turn that to Grandview as well. Could we click in a layer deeper and just sort of say, okay, can you give us a sense of some of the initiatives you might be getting toward? On Grandview, you had mentioned some early success in the conversations. I'm just sort of wondering if you could just remind us how big the prior flagship fund was, where are you in terms of invested, and then what the timeline might be for the new fund. Thank you. Yeah, sure, Bill.

I'm going to have you repeat the first part, I'll tackle Grandview. Fund III was about $150 million in committed capital. That's small relative to what they would've expected. They chose to stop taking commitments, recognizing that an opportunity to partner with us was on the horizon, and really preserve the return capability that was put in the ground, and is to be put in the ground for those that were the early adopters, so that we could focus on ultimately the launch of Fund IV. Fund IV, their flagship fund, we expect will be launched sometime later this summer, likely early in the fall of this year. We're obviously having conversations with that one anchor, as well as many of the existing LPs that have invested with them along Funds I through III.

We're feeling pretty good about where we're at with the anchor and the ability to get out there. It's important also to have some opportunities to share with clients that might make their way into the portfolio. They're working aggressively to identify and solidify those that will help us with the marketing campaign. Fund III was $150, and we expect that Fund IV will be multiples of that. As I'd mentioned in my prepared comments, we hired an institutional business leader that we expect to be helping us in a very meaningful way, to help us grow the business. That's where we're at with Grandview.

Okay. Just to clarify, sorry I asked five questions in one. You mentioned that the opportunity to maybe expand vehicles and capabilities in some of the teams. I think you sort of highlighted the EM platform. Just wondering if you could maybe give us an update on what kind of vehicles, what kind of incremental distribution partners you might have on the horizon. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry if I made it EM specific, but it's really across all the teams.

I think that each team has their own set of clients and distribution opportunities. But I would view it as, we have the opportunity to launch CITs private funds where institutional clients don't want to access a capability or a strategy that might come in a mutual fund or a more liquid wrapper, but also don't want to deal with a Separately Managed Account, which might require country openings or opening up of various derivative contracts and relationships with PBs and third parties. I think if you look at the totality of it, we would view CITs private funds. There's certainly the opportunity to widen the aperture in UCITS. We expect to launch a UCITS in the not-too-distant future. We're in some active conversations with a potential anchor there.

As I'd mentioned, we're not quite there yet on ETFs, but there's the possibility of doing ETFs, and that's not specific to EM, but just more generic to the platform.

Thank you. Thank you for taking all the questions.

Yeah. I would just highlight that one of the things that we've always said philosophically is that we want to be vehicle agnostic, and we're just really putting our money where our mouth is here. If a client wants to access our IP, we want to do it in a thoughtful way, but in a manner that really helps solidify the long-term relationship.

Our next question comes from Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your question.

Hi, everybody. Good morning. Thank you for taking the question as well. I was hoping to drill down a little bit into any other sizable redemption risks you might see across the equities portfolio. Particularly when we look at the growth team, there's a number of strategies that are still quite sizable and have underperformed. Any concentration risk we should be mindful of when it comes to those businesses, and how you're potentially managing that risk and just navigating this recent performance with clients.

Yeah. We've done a few things. First and foremost, I'd highlight mid-cap growth as a feature of what's occurred on the team. I think Matt Kamm and the leadership of the growth team thought it was important that they bring on a second key decision-maker in Jason White, who's been a longstanding member of leadership as well. Since we made that change, you can see the follow-through into performance. Mid-cap growth, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but they're having a nice year from a relative basis in 2026. They had a great 2025. We now have a strong year to date, a strong one year, a really strong three year. That's a very large and important piece of the growth franchise.

Really where I think the struggle, the intersection between difficult and challenging performance and AUM is really in the global segments of the growth team. Global opportunities, and Jim Hamel just recently brought Angela Wu into the mix to help him with the decision-making, and we think that that's going to be a key long-term benefit to the business and to the strategy. The second is we've hired a couple of recent additions in the analyst ranks, as well as in the associate portfolio manager ranks, to continue to bolster and upgrade the talent that we have and they have on the team to be able to access different securities and different opportunities. It's very early days, so I don't want to say that we're through the worst of it.

I think the team has been willing to disrupt themselves both proactively and with our help to make sure that they've got the right resources to help bolster the performance. In terms of client concentration, I think there was a fair bit of concentration that we talked a little bit about over the course of the last several years in the Australian market. It wasn't any one client in particular, but it was more of just the systematic issues and challenges that we were facing in the Australian market. Beyond that, there's certainly some clients that have a higher percentage of the AUM relative to others, but there's nothing that we would look at that would give us pause or concern that there's a brewing or looming cliff of AUM that's at risk that would cause a cascade effect.

The business is pretty well diversified, not only across strategy, but within strategy. It's pretty well diversified. Got you.

Okay. Understood. C.J., one follow-up for you just on the fee rates with US Value team rolling off, or strategy rather, rolling off. Are the fee rates across both the funds and separate accounts appropriate jumping off points as we sort of think on the forward basis? Is there any other implications as you're sort of thinking about the run rate fee rates for both of these sub-segments on a go forward?

Yeah. Good question. I mean, we had a little bit of movement this quarter. I think if you look at the year-to-date fee rates for this year, they're pretty good jumping off points. In the credit space, on a year-to-date basis, we are up a little bit. During the quarter, we did take on a large mandate that was a little lower than the fee rate. In the alternative space, we brought on the addition of Grandview, with a little under $1 billion in AUM at higher fee rates than we were running. That's new this year, and then we're continuing to win some business in EMsights. In the quarter, we had a nice win at a really attractive fee rate.

Year-to-date, the average between Q2 and Q1 is a decent jumping off point to think about for the rest of the year.

Yeah. Absolutely. Gotcha. Okay. All right.

Thank you. Our next question comes from John Dunn from Evercore ISI.

Please go ahead with your questions.

Thanks. Maybe on the other side of redemptions on the gross sales, could you give us a flavor of where you see your institutional pipeline at the moment and maybe some underlying stuff like what you're seeing as far as RFP activity, win % and composition, and kind of time to funding?

John, I'll tackle that. I'll break it up between institutional and intermediate wealth, I'll harken back to a comment more generally that I'd put into one of our earnings conversations, which was, we need to do a better job at selling more and losing less. When we look at our information and our data, and this is by no means I don't think of this as a trend, but it's starting to feel that way, which is our gross sales numbers look pretty good. We're not out of the woods, but we're feeling a lot better about what's happening, I think that stems from the fact that We talked about this where we had onboarded a number of people, both in the institutional world, but more specifically in the intermediate wealth side of our business.

However, many of those folks had just sort of been onboarded, we didn't have full fighting strength. I think we're now pretty close to full fighting strength. We've been onboarding some people in the non-U.S. business, specifically in the U.K. and EMEA region that are getting up the curve and building their own pipeline. We're just seeing a nice follow-through in terms of the gross sales. I think where we're continuing to experience both redemptions as well as some select terminations is really what's causing the net to be a little bit more challenged. So we feel like we're seeing the green shoots of many of the efforts and initiatives that we put on the distribution effort. We're still continuing to fight the rebalancing, which is natural in a market that continues to produce high teens returns depending on the market that you're looking at.

When you drill down and you look institutionally, we're also still doing quite well. We had a couple of really interesting wins in Q2. I think one thing I should have highlighted during the prior round of questions was Global Discovery on the growth team just landed a very large institutional mandate. It's funded predominantly in Q2 and will continue to slightly fund throughout the course of Q3. I think that's the hallmark type of client we're looking for. Somebody that sees the quality, the differentiation, the benefit of partnering with a team like our growth team, and are willing to look through some of the short-term performance challenges associated with the global platform. We saw a really nice win there. We talked about the sustainable emerging markets team and the pipeline and the path and the pattern that they're experiencing.

The international value franchise had a nice institutional win and continues to build on their pipeline. We're starting to see a lot of good things on both sides. If markets didn't produce mid to high teens returns, I think the rebalancing would be a lot less, and you'd see a little bit more of a balanced organic growth rate. For now, we're happy with what we're seeing incrementally on the gross inflow side. The gross outflows is really where we need to keep our clients a little bit longer than we have.

Got it. Maybe just to go back to Grandview for a second. Could you kind of give your thoughts on what you think the demand environment for private real estate is, just given the rates macro and kind of return cycle backdrop? You've talked about the fundraising, but maybe also the deployment. How should we think about deployment once the fund's raised?

Yeah. I think, obviously deployment can be slow and then speed up really quickly depending on the rate environment and certainly the macro environment. That being said, I think the great thing about Grandview, and certainly this is common, what you hear from us quite a bit about our existing teams is the degrees of freedom that they're able to express their capabilities in, and this comes in the sectors that they're going to invest in. Gives them really a lot of latitude to be able to deploy capital in a thoughtful and meaningful way. While Fund IV is going to have some reasonably specific themes that are going to be the hallmarks, there's always going to be dry powder associated with being opportunistic.

There are, as we've been speaking and spending time with the Grandview investment folks, they are finding some really interesting opportunities across a couple of more distressed sectors of the market that should prove to be quite compelling. Sometimes the rate environment actually works in your favor. It just gives you great opportunities to buy assets in a cheaper fashion because you just have distressed people in need of refinancing that just need to potentially either refinance at higher rates that aren't going to work for the economic model, or frankly, just sell it at a discount. It's hard to give you a true sense on deployment.

I would just say that in our conversations with the Grandview folks, they've got a pretty strong pipeline of investment opportunity that they're looking at across the few themes that will be featured in Fund IV, as well as some opportunistic investments that they're frankly in the market looking to execute on now.

Thank you. Our next question is a follow-up from Bill Katz from TD Cowen.

Please go ahead with your follow-up.

Great. Thanks for taking the extra questions. Jason, you mentioned a little bit about sort of the deal pipeline, some of your peers in the old space, so to speak, to pretty heady expectations from the sellers. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of the bid-ask spread. Then you mentioned earlier comments, so just the intersection of demand, good alpha generation, et cetera, and you've done very well on the credit side, but for the last couple of quarters, the credit's rolling performance looks like it's waning a little bit. Just sort of wondering, is there anything to be mindful on there or maybe what's driving the underperformance just so we can think about maybe the go-forward outlook? Thank you. Yeah, sure. Bill, I think this is question seven and eight.

We're going to have to cut you off at some point. No, you're absolutely right. I think there's very heady expectations, and we have been very active in working through our pipeline, and that has included a couple of, as I'd mentioned, inorganic opportunities where we presented a proposal that we thought was extremely compelling that didn't make it very much farther than the proposal. As you've come to know us, Bill, very well, we are going to remain disciplined and not extend ourselves in areas where we don't think we can achieve success for not only our clients, but ultimately our shareholders as well. So we remain focused on areas of finding inorganic opportunities where these are self-sourced, which is where and how we found Grandview.

Those are going to be great opportunities for us to find teams that maybe the dollar value isn't the only thing that's important. If it's a dollar value that's going to win the day, then it's probably going to be a little bit more challenging for us. We think we bring a total package of business leadership, distribution. Obviously, price does matter, but long-term growth and alignment does as well. For those that want that autonomy and not wind up getting tucked into be a sleeve of a broader platform or have their ideas pulled into other strategies, we think that we are an ideal home for the talent that really wants to continue to invest and grow. So we'll get our opportunities. We're just going to have to be thoughtful and deliberate.

Going back to your other question about the credit franchise, their performance and their underperformance is quite. It's not dramatic, and it's on the heels of obviously multiple years of outstanding performance. The short-term, I think is somewhat been challenged by the fact that they have not had a ton of energy exposure in their portfolio. These are not errors of commission. Had they known that the war was going to bail out a bunch of leveraged companies that were on their last legs, then shame on them. I don't think that that's something that they could have predicted. Brian and the team have stayed true to their discipline, and they will continue to, what we think deliver even in the face of a sectoral issue that has caused a bit of a short-term shortfall.

I should have mentioned, and I will now, that we did actually win an institutional mandate for our floating rate strategy inside of the credit team, $150-ish million mandate that gives not obviously huge in size, but it's very important in terms of the scale that it brings to that strategy. I think we've talked about scale to get scale. So that strategy continues to execute quite well under Brian's leadership, and we're continuing to see the fruits of their capability on the floating rate side, where we see actually pretty meaningful opportunity for growth in that segment of the business.

Thank you again. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we will be concluding today's question and answer session and the Artisan Partners Asset Management Business Update and first quarter 2026 earnings call.

Thank you. You may now disconnect your line.