Sprott Inc Aktie

Welcome to the Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Sprott Inc. Please note the meeting is being recorded.

I would like to introduce Mr. Ronald Dewhurst, Chairman of today's meeting. Mr. Dewhurst, the floor is yours.

The Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Sprott Inc. will now come to order. In accordance with the bylaws of the corporation, I shall preside as Chairman of the meeting.

In the event I am disconnected from the meeting as a result of a technical malfunction, pursuant to the corporation's bylaws, the shareholders are entitled to choose another director as Chair. Given that management has proxies in hand to carry any such motion, Mr. Whitney George, a Director and Chief Executive Officer of the corporation, will step in and assume the role of Chair of the meeting.

Mr. Arthur Einav, the Corporation's Corporate Secretary, will act as Secretary of the meeting. This year, we have made the decision to hold our annual meeting in a virtual-only format via this live audio webcast online.

In order to make the best use of our time, I will move all motions, and I have been advised by Mr. George and Mr. Einav, each a proxy holder in attendance today, that each is prepared to second each of the motions I so move. Accordingly, unless there are any objections, I will not require motions to be seconded.

As you may be aware, this morning, we announced our first quarter results. Our quarterly conference call to discuss those results took place earlier this morning, and a recording of the conference call is available on our website. Therefore, please limit any questions today to a discussion of the business of the meeting.

With the consent of the meeting, I appoint Christopher de Lima from TSX Trust Company as scrutineer to report on the number of shareholders present and common shares represented at this meeting and to tabulate the votes on the ballot taken at this meeting and to report to me on these matters.

Prior to the commencement of this meeting, the scrutineer filed a preliminary report on attendance. I've asked the scrutineer to deliver its formal report on attendance to the Secretary.

This year, the corporation used notice and access to deliver its annual financial statements and meeting materials. And as a result, the notice of meeting and the management information circular are accessible on Sprott's website and under Sprott's profile on SEDAR+ and EDGAR.

I have received the affidavits of publication of the record date for this meeting and of distribution of the notice and access notice and the proxy form. I direct that a copy of the notice, together with proof of service, be kept by the secretary with the records of the meeting. Accordingly, the reading of the notice of meeting will be dispensed with.

I have received the scrutineer's preliminary report on attendance, which indicates that there are a total of 298 shareholders either present in person or represented by proxy, holding an aggregate of 18,888,643 common shares, which represent approximately 73.25% of the total issued and outstanding.

The scrutineer's report shows that there is sufficient shareholders present or represented by proxy to constitute a quorum.

I declare that the requisite quorum is present and that the meeting is properly constituted for the transaction of business. I direct the scrutineer's report be annexed to the minutes of this meeting.

I will begin with a few comments regarding procedural matters. Questions in respect of a motion may be submitted by shareholders or proxy holders of record using the designated Ask a Question icon on the left side of your web portal. Only registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have signed in using their control number can ask questions.

You are encouraged to submit any comments or questions now or at any time during the formal discussion of the meeting's items of business. At the appropriate junctures of the meeting, comments or questions related to the business of the meeting will be read aloud by Mr. Einav before being addressed.

Comments or questions that are redundant or that are inappropriate language or are otherwise unduly disruptive to the orderly conduct of the meeting will not be addressed. And general shareholder questions that are not part of the formal discussion of the meeting items of business will not be addressed.

If during the course of the meeting, we encounter any technical difficulties with the webcast, please remain logged on, and we will resume as soon as practicable.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that today's meeting may include forward-looking statements. These statements are given as of today's date and involve risks and uncertainties discussed in our filings with securities regulators. A number of factors and assumptions were applied in the formulation of such statements, and actual results could differ materially. For additional information with respect to forward-looking statements, factors and assumptions, we direct you to Sprott's public filings.

Before we begin, I would also like to comment on the voting procedures for today's meeting. Only registered shareholders who held shares as of the meeting record date and those persons appointed as proxy holders are entitled to vote and participate at this meeting.

Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have logged into the TSX Trust virtual meeting platform with their control number and who have not voted and wish to vote during the meeting may vote. Voting on the applicable items of business to come before today's meeting will be conducted by a single electronic ballot.

Once the voting is open, you can click on to the voting button on the left of your screen. From there, the resolution and voting choices will be displayed. To vote, simply select your voting direction from the option shown on the screen. I will advise shareholders when the ballots will be closing.

All items of business listed in the proxy circular to be voted on today require approval by way of an ordinary resolution. Once you have accessed the voting page, you may use the for or withhold buttons next to the name of each individual director nominee and next to the resolution reappointing KPMG LLP as auditor of the corporation. I now declare the polls open on all resolutions.

The financial statements of the corporation for its fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, together with the report of the auditors thereon have been made available to shareholders of the corporation. In accordance with the Business Corporations Act (Ontario), the financial statements are presented to the meeting, but no other action is required with respect to them.

We will now proceed with the election of directors. The management information circular sets forth the background of each of the nominees and the qualifications considered in making director nominations.

The proposed nominees as listed in the circular are Graham Birch, Barbara Connolly Keady, Dinaz Dadyburjor, Whitney George, Judith O'Connell, Catherine Raw and myself, Ronald Dewhurst. Thank you to the nominees for agreeing to stand for election.

I move to formally nominate as a director each of the proposed nominees as listed in the management information circular. As there are no nominations in accordance with the advanced notice requirements of the corporation's bylaw #1, I declare nominations closed.

I also move to elect each of the 7 named individuals as directors of the corporation. As advised earlier, I will take such motions as seconded.

The motion is now open for discussion. If you are a registered shareholder or proxy holder of record and would like to discuss, please submit such discussion by using the message service on your screen. I will pause for 10 seconds. And after 10 seconds, I would ask the moderator to read any applicable comments or questions.

Mr. Chairman, there are no comments or questions to be addressed.

Thank you, Arthur. You are reminded to complete your ballot on this matter.

The next item on the agenda is the appointment of the corporation's auditors. I move that a resolution be approved reappointing KPMG LLP as auditors of the corporation to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting or until a successor is appointed and to authorize the Board to fix their remuneration and terms of engagement and take such motion as seconded.

The motion is now open for discussion. As before, I will pause for 10 seconds. And after 10 seconds, I would ask the moderator to read any applicable comments or questions.

Mr. Chairman, there are no comments or questions to be addressed.

Thank you, Arthur. You are reminded to complete your ballot on this matter.

For shareholders who have not completed their electronic ballot, you will now have 20 seconds to complete your electronic ballot. Once voting is completed, the scrutineers will compile the report regarding the results of voting on all items of business, and we will reconvene at that time.

Once the electronic balloting closes, the voting page will disappear and your ballots will be automatically be submitted.

[Voting]

The polls are officially closed.

Mr. Chairman, I'm reporting to you on behalf of the scrutineers that all sufficient votes have been received for all items of business to pass.

Thank you, Arthur, and scrutineers. Accordingly, with respect to the resolution regarding election of each of the individuals nominated as directors, I declare that each of the 7 nominees is elected as a director of the corporation.

With respect to the resolution reappointing KPMG LLP as auditors of the corporation and authorizing the Board to fix their remuneration and terms of agreement, I declare this resolution carried.

Is there any further business? I will pause for 10 seconds. And after 10 seconds, I would ask the moderator to read any applicable comments.

Mr. Chairman, there is no further business.

Thank you, Arthur. If you have any general questions about the corporation or its business, please do not hesitate to e-mail Mr. Glen Williams, the corporation's Senior Managing Partner, Investor and Institutional Client Relations, Head of Corporate Communications at [email protected].

There being no further business, I move that the meeting be terminated and take such motion as seconded. I declare the motion carried and the meeting terminated. Thank you for taking the time to join our meeting today.

Thank you, everyone, for joining. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Sprott Inc.'s 2026 First Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, May 6, 2026.

On behalf of the speakers that follow, listeners are cautioned that today's presentation and the responses to questions may contain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws.

Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Certain material factors or assumptions are implied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. For additional information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and about material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements, please consult the MD&A for the quarter and Sprott's other filings with the Canadian and U.S. securities regulators.

I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Whitney George. Please go ahead, Mr. George.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. On the call with me today is our CFO and Co-COO, Kevin Hibbert; and John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott Asset Management.

Our 2026 first quarter results were released this morning and are available on our website, where you can also find the financial statements and MD&A. I'll start on Slide 4, the year-to-date highlights. A lot has happened since we spoke last time. It's hard to believe it's only 4 months into this year. First quarter was an exceptionally volatile quarter for precious metals. After a powerful rally to all-time new highs in January, positioning and momentum in gold became increasingly stretched.

On January 29, the market tipped, triggering gold's largest 1-day decline in over 4 decades as systemic strategies, CTAs and leveraged investors rapidly unwound crowded positions. The correction proved brief. Gold rebounded sharply through February, rising from $4,663 to over $5,300 by early March. That recovery, however, was abruptly interrupted by the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. The U.S.-Israel strike on Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggered a global liquidity event rather than a conventional risk-off response.

In a scramble to raise cash amid surging cross-asset volatility, investors sold their most liquid and successful holdings and gold was no exception. Compounding the move, Central Bank and sovereign demand, particularly from the Gulf states temporarily stalled amid disruptions to oil revenue. In some cases, reserves were drawn down to fund fiscal and defense needs. As a result, gold fell sharply in March, briefly breaking below $4,100 in illiquid markets, but has since stabilized.

Importantly, the decline reflected a liquidity-driven deleveraging and a pause in reserve flow demand, not a failure of gold's underlying investment thesis. While near-term volatility remains elevated, the structural foundation of gold's bull market remain firmly intact. Gold has since stabilized and is currently trading around $4,700. Silver followed a similar, although more dramatic trajectory to gold during the quarter. After spending the first half of 2025 trading in the mid-$30 range an ounce, silver broke out in the second half of the year to close at $71.47 at year-end.

Rather than slowing down in January, silver's ascent continued as speculators piled into the trade. When the precious metals corrected in late January, silver gave back most of its 2026 gains falling 38% peak to trough. While prices have recovered somewhat and silver is currently trading around $77 per ounce, silver has not bounced back as well as gold. Silver is both a precious metal and a critical material, which is entering its sixth year of structural supply deficit.

We are optimistic about its long-term prospects as it has come way off its highs and is a long way from an inflation-adjusted peak. Despite the volatility in precious metals, Sprott managed to deliver another strong quarter, largely due to the continued growth of our critical materials strategies. Our assets under management increased by $5.5 billion to $65.1 billion, and we reported $1.7 billion in net sales, 96% of which came from -- came to our critical materials segment. These flows were broad-based with 21 separate strategies generating positive sales during the quarter. We continue to expand our critical materials suite with the recent launch of the Sprott Rare Earths Ex-China ETF, REXC.

This new fund was launched on April 15 and has already exceeded $30 million in assets, making it our most successful ETF launch to date. John will give you more details on this in a few minutes. Our managed equities business delivered solid relative performance during the quarter despite the challenging precious metals market. And finally, we recorded $52 million in performance fees and carried interest in our private strategies.

With that, I'll pass it over to Kevin for a review of our financial results. Kevin?

Thanks, Whitney, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 5, which provides a summary of our historical AUM. AUM finished the quarter at $65.1 billion, up 9% from $59.6 billion as at December 31, 2025. On a 3 months ended basis, we benefited from market value appreciation across a majority of our fund products and positive net inflows to our exchange-listed products.

Slide 6 provides a brief look at our 3-month earnings. Net income this quarter was $29.2 million, up $17.3 million from $12 million over the same 3-month period last year. Our net income performance was primarily due to higher average AUM in our exchange-listed products segment, managed equities segment and carried interest crystallization in our private strategies segment. These increases were partially offset by higher stock-based compensation expense, primarily due to our stock price appreciating 46% in the quarter compared to only 6% in the first quarter of last year. Consistent with my comment last year that the rising stock price would lead to a materially lower amount of RSUs being granted in 2026, our total RSU issuance for 2026 was 276,943 units, down 72% from 976,550 units granted last year.

Adjusted EBITDA, which excludes quarterly volatility from items like stock-based compensation and intermittent carried interest and performance fee crystallizations was $57.9 million for the quarter, up $36 million from $21.9 million over the same 3-month period last year. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter benefited from higher average AUM on market value appreciation and inflows to our physical trusts and ETFs as well as higher average AUM in our managed equities products.

Finally, Slide 7 provides a few treasury and balance sheet management highlights. And as you can see here, our cash and liquidity profile continues to be quite strong. For more information on our revenues, expenses, net earnings, adjusted EBITDA and balance sheet metrics, you can refer, as always, to the supplemental information section of this presentation as well as our quarterly MD&A and financial statements filed earlier this morning.

With that said, I'll pass things over to John.

Yes. Thanks, Kevin, and good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining our call. Turning over to Slide 8. It was obviously a very eventful quarter with extreme volatility experienced in most metal prices. AUM in the physical trust was up $3.5 billion or 7.4% in the quarter. And despite the noise and uncertainty in the market, the fundamentals for metals are very constructive and geopolitical events have only reinforced their strategic importance. Year-to-date, we have witnessed all-time high metal prices for gold, silver, copper and uranium briefly touched triple digits per pound. While many investors are currently sitting on the sidelines, we view the market pause as transitory in nature as it is impossible to model in price risk related to the current conflict in the Middle East.

Turning to the next slide. Net flows were very robust in the quarter at $862 million, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of net flows exceeding $800 million. While we did experience some physical redemptions during the quarter, we are already seeing a moderation as discounts to NAV have tightened. The Sprott Physical Uranium Trust continues to attract new capital at a record rate as the growing structural supply deficit and a renewed focus on energy security is expected to benefit nuclear energy.

Sprott has raised more capital in dollar terms over the past few quarters than at any time since its inception in July of 2021, reflecting this bullish outlook. Silver, as Whitney mentioned, was also a key performer in the quarter, fueled by its long overdue re-rating and catch-up trade to gold.

Shifting to our ETF product suite on Slide 10. We generated very strong asset growth driven by market appreciation and net flows across a broadening range of metal segments. AUM in the quarter jumped 30% and 42% year-to-date to May 1. As you can see from the groups of color-coded ticker symbols, we have developed a broad suite of ETFs over the last 4 years in anticipation of the secular rotation back to metals and mining.

Commodity cycles run much longer than business cycles, elongated by their long CapEx and development time lines, and we continue to believe we are still in the early innings. We continue to engage with a growing list of generalist investors as they are attracted to the strong fundamentals, seek portfolio diversification and begin to hedge against novel risks like stagflation. At the beginning of 2022, our only 2 ETFs focused on gold mining stocks. Since then through a key acquisition and an active organic product development strategy, we now offer a broad suite of mining ETFs covering precious metals, critical materials, copper, battery metals and rare earths. This thoughtfully executed strategy is delivering strong results and more importantly, has positioned Sprott as the go-to firm for metals and mining funds.

Moving to Slide 11. ETF flows reached a record $1.1 billion in the quarter. Most of our ETFs experienced inflows, reflecting the broad interest across the metals complex. Momentum post the quarter end remained strong with another $184 million in net flows.

And finally, just turning to Slide 12, which highlights our product pipeline. As I mentioned, we have aggressively developed our product suite over the past few years to capitalize on the bull market currently underway. In 2024, we completed the IPO of the Sprott Physical Copper Trust on the Toronto Stock Exchange. On Monday of this week, we successfully cross-listed the trust on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SCOP. This represents the very first physical copper vehicle listed in the United States. Like with uranium, we believe there's a sizable market opportunity to scale our copper trust. Copper is the backbone of electrification and other critical applications, while supply conditions remain constructively tight. Copper's growing uses outside of traditional industrial applications are driving global demand.

And finally, we're very excited about our latest addition, the Sprott Rare Earths Ex-China ETF. The ticker is REXC that's listed on the NASDAQ, which we launched in mid-April. Investors and governments alike have realized the strategic importance of rare earth metals for technologies, defense and energy sectors. REXC represents the first pure-play rare earth ETF listed globally, and it also has a unique ex-China focus to capitalize on the reshoring efforts that are only accelerating as China continues to weaponize its dominance of the global supply chain for rare earths. Initial investor response has been very positive, and the fund is already over $30 million in assets in about 2 weeks.

Finally, on prior calls, we highlighted the success of the Sprott Silver Miners and Physical Silver ETF, which has grown to almost $800 million in just over 1 year. Flows and performance relative to competitors have both been excellent. On April 16, we launched a UCITS version of this ETF for distribution in the U.K. and Europe.

And with that, I'll pass it to Whitney.

Thanks, John. We'll move now to Slide 13 for a look at our managed equities segment. Our managed equities AUM grew 12% during the first quarter despite the market turbulence and now stands at $3.6 billion (sic) [ $6.3 billion ]. On Slide 14 is a picture of our flows. We've yet to see meaningful flows into our managed equities offerings despite the very, very strong performance. We continue to believe that a new crop of investors will rotate into this sector once the fundamentals become too compelling to ignore.

I'll now turn to Slide 15 for a quick comment on our private strategies. Private strategies AUM was $2 billion at the end of March 2026. This is a bit of a transition year for our private strategies. We are exiting or winding down the lending fund -- second lending fund and we'll begin marketing Lending Fund IV sometime midyear, which we expect to be a 12- to 18-month process. We are optimistic that we can grow our private strategies, which have failed to keep pace with the rapid growth in other areas of our business, but we have an outstanding team and track record.

We are currently evaluating new strategies and extensions of existing offerings. The fundamental -- the fundraising period, as I mentioned, for the next lending fund will be 12 to 18 months. Okay. I'd like to turn to Slide 15 now, which should be taken closely with Slide 16. This is our historical AUM growth with our operating margin. The thing I love about the asset management business is one has the opportunity to deliver operating leverage without financial leverage. I think many have seen the AUM EBITDA progression chart before, but something new is the next chart, which shows our balance sheet progression. And as you can see, we were heavily invested in our own products back in -- 10 years ago. That co-investment blue line has come down significantly. Meanwhile, we had taken on some debt that's been completely paid off as of December '24. And then the green line, of course, is the cash. So not only is our balance sheet stronger, but it's more liquid than it's ever been.

Okay. Slide -- the ongoing -- Slide 17 -- 18, sorry, the ongoing geopolitical conflicts are reinforcing the case for both precious metals and critical materials investments. Trade disruptions have highlighted the importance of physical ownership in sectors including metals, energy and agriculture. Security of supply is now a top priority. Despite recent volatility, the structural elements of the precious metals bull market remain intact and even strengthened by recent events.

We're very pleased with the growth in our ETF product suite and critical materials franchise and believe investor demand for these strategies will continue to increase. We've worked very hard to establish Sprott as a thought leader in this space, which is resulting in a greater brand recognition from institutions, advisers and individual investors. With our core positioning in precious metals and critical materials, we're well positioned to benefit from what will be a powerful rotation into real asset investments. That concludes our remarks for today's call, and I'll now turn it over to the operator for some Q&A. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Etienne Ricard at BMO Capital Markets.

To circle back on the meaningful increase to inflows across your ETF lineup. What has worked well for Sprott from a distribution standpoint? And a refresher on your ETF strategy for new launches would be appreciated.

Etienne, it's John. Hope you're doing well. Yes, lots of really good questions there. I think, obviously, you need to have the right products at the right time when investor interest is there. And I think our strategy is very simple. We want to make sure that we have developed very thoughtful products. And obviously, our products on the ETF side are passively managed.

They run through very well-defined index methodologies, but I think it's fair to say that the index development has a lot of Sprott DNA and our fingerprints all over those methodologies. And what I'm referring to is that we have a partnership with NASDAQ, where we go through over 800 different mining companies, and we basically evaluate and score them for their exposures to different metals. And this is a very unique, I think, approach in the marketplace. And as a result, you'll see our index construction process is very different. I think the really best example I can share with you is our Silver Miners ETF, where we have 2x the exposure relative to our other competitors. And this really is playing itself out in terms of performance.

We have, candidly, outperformed our competitors because we have more targeted exposure to silver. And I think the market is slowly starting to appreciate this as we educate them that not all ETFs are created equally. So we have a very thoughtful approach. There's no point in coming to market with another me-too product. We really need to have something differentiated. I think the power of our brands and our long history in metals and mining give us a unique advantage in terms of distribution and our relentless focus on education across every investor segment globally has really paid off for us.

We've obviously been educating investors for many years about the investment cases and the fundamentals for many of these metals. And we often get called from institutions right around the world that want to talk to us for our views on uranium, even though these are passively managed products. And I think that clearly highlights there is an intangible value to what we've brought to market. The ETFs provide obviously a very unique distribution strategy because anybody that can access those tickers is a potential target for us. And we obviously see lots of cross-border, cross-regional interest in our ETFs, which almost provide ubiquitous distribution for us.

So it's a lot of pieces coming together. Obviously, market timing is important. I think this Rare Earth Ex-China ETF is probably one of our best timed new funds in terms of what's going on in the markets and how the mainstream media is really helping to do our job in terms of educating investors around the weaponization of materials that are very important to run everything from cars to cell phones to missiles to other very important strategic technologies. So we're very thoughtful about how we come to market. I think that's allowed us to bring a suite of products that's highly differentiated and also products that are not getting sucked into the race to 0, which is obviously fee compression in the ETF world, which is very widespread in a lot of the mainstream cluttered categories with lots of competitors.

So I hope that gives you some color on how we've approached the market. And I think it's fair to say that after many years of planting seeds that we are really harvesting right now, which is really exciting.

Thanks for sharing, John. And I want to follow up on the Copper Trust and the listing on the NYSE. How meaningful could this be in terms of raising new capital? And in terms of risk, how do you think about redemption risk for this trust relative to gold or silver, for example?

Yes. Good questions. The New York Stock Exchange is obviously kind of your premier listing. And obviously, we have products listed on both the Toronto and New York Stock Exchange. And what we have historically experienced is the bulk of the trading happens there. We were able to list the Copper Trust on the OTC market in the United States as a bridge, but we -- you quickly find out that many investor groups are unable to trade OTC tickers. So we were really not gaining full access to the available marketplace. So listing the vehicle, I think, really opens the door for access.

Retail investors, obviously, advisers and even some institutional investors and institutional investors abroad, obviously, have ready access to the New York Stock Exchange. One of the enhancements and requirements that we had to implement in order to list on the New York Stock Exchange was to broaden the physical redemption feature on the vehicle from twice per year with a cap to monthly with no cap. And this is a key function that allows and incentivizes arbitrage, which means that the trust drifts too much away from its net asset value.

Market participants will take advantage of that dislocation, buy up the shares, help to tighten that spread. And in most cases, they physically will just try to sell their shares into the market when that happens. The second off-ramp is if it doesn't happen in a reasonable amount of time, some entities will be able to tender their shares back in for physical redemption.

Now who is able to do that? It's obviously investors that have a high minimum dollar amount because it is 100 metric tons, minimum. But they also need to have a storage arrangements at LME or COMEX warehouses. So that's the second constraint. So obviously, that limits the number of players to typically traders and perhaps some hedge funds. But they do play a role to help the fund trade tighter, and that's important for institutional interest, and it's also important because it better positions us to be able to raise new equity because we can't raise new equity in the vehicle until it trades above its NAV.

So it is part of the ecosystem. It has worked very well for our other physical trusts that have had the same feature for the last 15 years. And we're hopeful that these enhancements are going to accelerate the growth in the Copper Trust, which I think more and more generalist investors are starting to understand how important physical copper is. Right now, there are other funds, but they are solely focused on copper futures. And we obviously believe that physical copper right now is of utmost importance given the supply disruptions we're seeing globally.

Your next question comes from the line of Bart Dziarski at RBC Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask around the balance sheet, and thanks for that added disclosure on Slide 17. So you're clearly in a really strong position with no debt. Cash just keeps growing. And so could you just update us on capital allocation? And could this result -- if the performance continues, could this result in sort of capital returns to shareholders in some form or another?

Absolutely. I'll take that and maybe Kevin could add on to it. So as you can see, this is all fairly new. We have a history of paying nice dividends. So dividend growth would obviously be one priority. Not only myself, but every single employee is a Sprott shareholder. And so dividends are clearly enjoyed. We have a share buyback in place. We executed a little bit when the stock fell at the end of the first quarter and a little bit more subsequently.

Depending on the price level, we could get a lot more aggressive on executing on that. And again, we have -- we're going to launch some new private strategies, which require co-invest. And finally, we're still always open to looking at things that might make good acquisitions that are on strategy for Sprott.

Great. And then I guess, a segue for [ Ken ] into private strategies. So you're looking to fundraise LF-IV in Q2. Could you give us a sense of maybe what the investor mix, geographic mix you're targeting? And then what percentage of co-invest you might be looking to participate in that fund?

We've got to be a little careful about how much we talk about private strategies. Once upon a time, our co-invest was 100% and our first lending fund, I think it was 10%. I think the standard now that we have a long record is more like [ 2% ], I would say the fundraising would begin probably after the second quarter and into the third. We expect to have a lot of returning investors, which tend to be very large institutions. The minimums are large. They're predominantly in the U.S., but we have prospects and clients in Canada, in the Middle East. It's kind of a global audience.

Your next question comes from the line of Graham Ryding at TD Securities.

Could you just give us some color on the $50 million -- $52 million of carried interest in the quarter? Was that related to the $178 million of private strategies that was distributed back? Or was it related to more than that? And then maybe any color on unrealized carry that's currently sitting behind your $2 billion of private strategies?

Right. Graham, I'll tackle that. So the $52 million or $51 million specifically on the private side, it's unrelated to the capital distribution. That's related to one of our legacy funds for one thing. And then I think your other question was color on any unrealized carry?

Correct. Yes.

Okay. So yes, we can't provide color on that. As you know, the accounting rules changed a few years ago, precluding us from coming up with accruals and estimates on unrealized unless there's pretty much virtue of certainty around it. So not an awful lot to provide there, except to say that the investments that are chosen by the management team on that side continue to be quite compelling. So we're looking forward to the future and continuing to provide value in that regard in terms of future carry. But I can't give you anything in terms of estimates or outlooks or anything like that, unfortunately.

Okay. So what triggered the $52 million of carried interest this quarter that wasn't related to distributions back to the shareholders? What gives you the visibility to realize on that now?

The fact that it's actually been earned and paid out. So the way the accounting works now under IFRS for carry is once you've passed the critical events in the earnings process and in particular, it's actually been paid out, that's when you book it. So it's essentially cash accounting.

Okay. And then your Lending Fund II, can you remind us how big that is? Because it's obviously in sort of harvesting phase now? And then what's the size that you're targeting for Lending Fund IV?

I don't know, Whitney, do you want to tackle the Lending Fund IV piece?

Sure. I think at peak, Lending II had a committed capital of $900 million. Each fund has gotten bigger primarily because clients have been happy and increased their appetite each one. And the record is long and strong. And so given Sprott's brand, our expanded institutional team, I would love to see the next one be twice as big as the last one.

Okay. Understood. And then my last question, just to make sure I'm sort of getting your messaging right here. But hopefully, but if we are to see some resolution start to surface in the Middle East, eventually any reason why the sort of factors that were driving precious metals previous to that situation? Any reason why they wouldn't surface again?

It's certainly our expectation that we're just in a pause in a very long-term bull market for precious metals, really driven by the fiscal situation in all the developed world. It's actually not that gold is necessarily going up so much. It's just all the currencies that's measured in are going down. And the reason they're going down is because of the level of debt that exists out there and the ability to service it. So that's still very much there, if not more so post this conflict.

And we do seem to be de-dollarizing in our case. But again, I think all hard assets are in a very strong position as you look forward. And of course, it's been decades since investors actually looked at mining companies. And as we mentioned, their individual fundamentals are so strong and so obvious now that I think we'll see continued performance from that sector and better performance.

And Graham, just to answer the last half of your second question to me, the Lending Fund II was roughly about $27 million that's left.

Your next question comes from the line of Vritti Munjal at Canaccord Genuity.

Congratulations on a strong quarter. My question is around clients. So, historically, you've skewed more institutional. Are you seeing any meaningful pickup in retail or other channels, particularly given the macro backdrop around gold and critical minerals? And is that changing how you think about distribution?

Yes. It's John. Yes. Look, we're seeing, I think broadening interest. A few years ago, I think retail investors were kind of the lone group that we're positioned in a lot of these segments. It's only been, I would say, in the last 2, 3, 4 years that we've seen a broadening of interest institutionally. And it started off in -- amongst more specialty funds, funds with specific mandates related to metals and mining or energy transition or just general energy and power trading funds. In the last 2 years, there's been a clear pivot to more generalist funds.

These are funds that I would say have been 0 weight metals and mining for the last 10 to 12 years. And we're at the point now where it's impossible to ignore for a few reasons. One, the fundamentals look really fantastic. But two, it's starting to create benchmark risk, meaning any investor who is managing an active strategy against a benchmark with metals and mining is really starting to underperform with little to no weight in metals and mining. And we're definitely seeing investors reach out to us to better understand the landscape of metals and mining as well as investing in Sprott Inc., the company itself as a proxy to gain exposure to a broad range of metals and mining.

And those are discussions we just have not had for many, many years. Even though the discussions have accelerated dramatically, we still think we're in the early innings and that most investors are still very, very underweight, all things, metals and mining. And as understanding and acceptance and some of the legacy stigma and scar tissue fade away, we think there's more and more money to come.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Kozak from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Congrats on the quarter. A couple of questions from me and my first one, you kind of -- John, you just kind of just answered it, but I want to be a bit more specific. I found it interesting in Q1 to see large net inflows to the critical materials ETFs despite copper and uranium prices that net-net were basically flat quarter-over-quarter. Do you have a good sense of just where those specific inflows came from in Q1 geographically and then retail versus institutional, that would be interesting color.

Yes. Mike, so it's interesting when you look at our lineup of funds, where we have the greatest skew to institutional ownership is uranium one, copper two. And those are the categories that I think most institutions are well positioned in and are starting to build their exposures to. With uranium, it is very global in nature. We're seeing lots of interest in North America, parts of Asia, Australia. It has become, I think, a very universal investment thesis.

Copper, obviously, is a very big metals category, and that makes it very investable. And we would argue that there's even broader distribution and interest in copper. But the interest in those two categories, I would say, is very institutional. The retail interest in uranium has stated a little bit. There are some signs of it coming back. We've had very good performance and flows in the uranium mining fund in the last few months. And copper, I'd say, is more institutionally driven than retail. Sometimes we find retailer looking for things that are a little bit more spicy and volatile, and we've seen, I think, greater interest in some of the copper mining funds. Our junior copper mining ETFs was one of the best performing last year, and we think that has more of a retail investor audience.

Okay. That's helpful.

The adviser channel is very important for us, and we've been working at it for many, many years. And I think our size and scale of our products has allowed them to gradually get into larger and larger platforms. We are now -- we have a key accounts department. They're working with some of the larger regional broker-dealers that are out there that are now adopting our products and approving them on their platform.

Certainly, our silver ETF has a lot of retail appeal for reasons mentioned earlier. And then some of our broad-based critical materials ETFs, both SETM, which is passive and our active METL, again, provide an adviser with a great solution to get cross exposure without having to pick copper, uranium or silver at any one period in time. So that's all resonating. And again, in the ETF business, size begets size.

Yes. Okay. That's very helpful. And then my second question, if I could. And Whitney, you touched on this at the top of the call. Obviously, a ton of volatility in gold and silver prices in Q1. I'm sure you guys monitor this internally, but I'm just kind of curious, what was total consolidated AUM in late January when gold was north of $5,300 and silver was north of $110. Just curious.

Kevin can probably be precise, but it was north of $80 billion.

Yes, that's right. It was about $85 billion, Mike.

We'll see where things go over the medium and longer term here, right? But I was just curious. Congrats on the quarter.

At this time, I'll turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for participating in this call. We appreciate your interest in Sprott and look forward to speaking to you again after our second quarter results, and we will remain contrarian, innovative and aligned. Have a great day.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. We thank you for attending, and you may now disconnect your lines.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Sprott Inc.'s 2025 Fourth Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, February 19, 2026.

On behalf of the speakers that follow, listeners are cautioned that today's presentation and the responses to questions may contain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Certain material factors or assumptions are implied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. For additional information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations or material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements, please consult the MD&A for the quarter and Sprott's other filings with the Canadian and U.S. securities regulators.

I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Whitney George. Please go ahead, Mr. George.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. On the call with me today is our CFO, Kevin Hibbert; and John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott Asset Management. Our 2025 fourth quarter results were released this morning and are available on our website, where you can also find the financial statements and MD&A.

I'll start on Slide 4. In short, it was a banner year for Sprott in 2025. Our core positioning in precious metals and critical materials investments allowed us to navigate volatile market conditions and deliver outstanding results for our clients and our shareholders. Our AUM increased by $10.5 billion during the fourth quarter and closed the year at $59.6 billion, up $28.1 billion from December 31, 2024. Subsequent to year-end, our AUM has continued to grow by another $10.5 billion to reach $70.1 billion as of February 13, 2026.

Investor interest in multiple different metals contributed to strong net sales in 2025, primarily in our exchange-listed products. Our ETF business has been on a growth trajectory since 2021 and accounted for more than $4.6 billion of our total AUM as of year-end. This business is off to a strong start in 2026 with [indiscernible] AUM now approaching $7 billion. Our Managed Equity and Private Strategies segments also delivered excellent results in 2025, generating more than $54 million in gross performance and carried interest fees.

With that, I'll pass it over to Kevin for a look at our financial results. Kevin?

Thank you, Whitney, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 5, which provides a summary of our historical AUM. To Whitney's point, AUM finished the year at $59.6 billion, up 21% from $49.1 billion as at September 30, 2025, and was up 89% from $31.5 billion as at December 31, 2024.

On a 3- and 12-month ended basis, we benefited from market value appreciation across the majority of our fund products and positive net inflows to our exchange-listed products. Subsequent to year-end, as at February 13, our AUM stood at $70.1 billion, up 18% from our December 31 AUM. Our performance subsequent to year-end was the result of $7.7 billion of market value appreciation and the $2.8 billion of net inflows primarily in our exchange-listed products.

Slide 6 provides a brief look at our 3- and 12-month earnings. Net income this quarter was $28.7 million, up $17 million from $11.7 million over the same 3-month period last year. On a full year basis, our net income was $67.3 million, up $18.1 million from $49.3 million last year. Our net income performance was primarily due to market value appreciation and inflows to our precious metals physical trusts and carried interest and performance fee crystallizations in our Managed Equities and Private Strategies segment.

These increases were partially offset by a change in accounting requirements brought on by our new cash-settled stock plan that took effect this year. As we mentioned in previous quarters, cash-settled stock plans like the one we implemented this year require the use of mark-to-market and graded vest accounting under IFRS 2, which creates the dual impact of accelerating the amount of vesting that occurs each period, and adding market volatility to each vesting amount.

In our case, this nearly doubled the amount of RSUs, subject to the accounting expense methodology versus what will actually vest in the year. And at a time when our stock has appreciated 18% in the quarter and 132% on a full year basis. In contrast, in 2024, we had an equity-settled stock program that required each vest to be valued at the original grant date fair value on a constant basis over the amortization period.

Moving forward, in 2026, there will be less amortization hitting our IFRS P&L relating to the 2025 3-year grants and less shares being added for our 2026 3-year grants. However, we do expect continued increases to our stock-based compensation expense on a comparative basis for at least the first half of 2026 since our stock did not begin the majority of its ascent until the summer of 2025. This means to the extent our stock price remains at current levels, the second half of 2026 should begin to produce lower period-over-period volatility as the trading range of SII in the second half of 2025 is a little closer to where we currently trade.

Adjusted EBITDA, which excludes quarterly volatility from items like stock-based compensation and intermittent carried interest and performance fee crystallization, was $42 million for the quarter, up 88% from $22.4 million over the same 3-month period last year. And was $121 million on a full year basis, up 43% from $85.2 million earned last year. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter and on a full year basis benefited from higher average AUM, on-market value appreciation I described previously and inflows to our precious metals physical trust and ETF.

Finally, Slide 7 provides a few treasury and balance sheet management highlights. And as you can see, due to our improved earnings, our cash and liquidity profile strengthened this year and we raised our dividend by 33% in November. For more information on our revenues, expenses, net income, adjusted EBITDA and balance sheet metrics, you can refer to the supplemental information section of this presentation as well as our annual MD&A and financial statements filed earlier this morning.

With that said, I'll pass things over to John.

Thanks, Kevin, and good morning, everybody. Now just turning to Slide 8. Sprott has held a bullish thesis on most metals and miners for the past few years. Over the past 5, we've invested heavily in our team, made timely acquisitions, developed a broad suite of differentiated offerings that incorporate our knowledge and expertise and develop new partnerships to broaden our distribution reach. We think it's fair to say that the world is catching up with our view that we are in a new metals-driven commodity super cycle and capital is finally on the move. Investors are looking for new investment ideas where long-term fundamentals appear durable and compelling.

In 2025, our physical trust fund suite generated significant growth with a 97% gain in AUM to $47 billion. Momentum continues with another $7 billion added year-to-date. As we've mentioned in the past, growing AUM and liquidity begets AUM and liquidity as ever larger institutions allocate to the sector. And price signals are bullish of the 6 metals we offer in physical form. Gold, silver, platinum and copper have all recently reached all-time highs, while uranium touched a 2-year high.

Moving to the next slide, which is net flows into our physical trusts. We saw a record sales year in 2025. Flows in Q4 were very strong, and they've continued into January. Our gold, silver and uranium trusts accounted for the bulk of the flows, but I'd like to highlight an emerging contributor, which is our Physical Copper Trust. While sales in 2025 were modest at only $4 million that Copper Trust has already generated $54 million year-to-date as copper, as I mentioned, recently hit a new high.

We recently received approval by the SEC to cross-list the trust on the NYSE Arca Exchange and subject to unitholder approval, we expect the Copper Trust to begin trading there in early Q2. Once listed, this will be the first physical copper fund to trade in the United States.

Investor interest in copper is growing as copper's strategic role in electrification is becoming better understood, along with our copper mining ETFs, assets in our copper suite of funds now stands at approximately $800 million and 2 years ago to yesterday, our assets in the category were only $6 million.

Moving to the next slide, which is our ETF suite. 2025 was a breakout year with a 94% gain in AUM. Assets have gained another astonishing 45% year-to-date as growing scale creates a flywheel effect. A few items to highlight over the past year to February 18, Sprott has 6 ETFs in the top 25 in performance out of over 4,000 U.S. listed non-levered ETFs. The Sprott Physical Silver miners and Physical Silver ETFs, NYSE Arca ticker SLVR has been a huge win for our investors and shareholders. SLVR surpassed $1 billion in assets in its first year of trading. This has been our fastest-growing ETF launch to date and illustrates the value of our brand, expertise and relationships.

Flows into our copper mining ETFs are accelerating, driven by superior performance to our competitors. And finally, our relationship with HANetf, which is our European distribution partner, continues to grow and assets now stand at $650 million.

Moving to Slide 11. Sales were solid in 2025 despite some outflows from our uranium mining ETFs in the second half of the year. Since the year-end, we've seen a sharp pickup in sales momentum with flows matching cumulative sales in all of 2022, '23 and '24. A number of our ETFs just achieved 3-year track records and highlight to investors that not all indexes are created equal. Our index construction focuses on pure-play companies, and utilizes a dynamic universe approach to provide a differentiated offering that is translating into superior investment results. For example, our critical materials ETF ticker SETM and our copper mining ETFs have outperformed their closest competitors since their inception dates.

I'll now pass it over to Whitney to talk about Managed Equities.

Thank you, John. We'll move now to Slide 12 for a look at our Managed Equities segment. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, our managed equity strategies delivered strong performance in 2025 with AUM increasing by 97% during the year to $5.7 billion. Our flagship gold equity fund gained 18% in the fourth quarter and was up 148% on a full year basis, and some of our private partnerships did even better. Despite their strong performance, these strategies reported modest outflows in 2025.

In the fourth quarter of '25, the sub-advisory agreement of our Silver Equities Fund was opportunistically terminated by our client despite being up 175% as of December 1. We continue to leverage our strengths in our investment team through our recently launched actively managed ETFs. The Sprott Active Gold and Silver Miners ETF and the Sprott Active Metals and Miners ETF continue to scale, with AUM reaching $202 million and $105 million, respectively.

I'll turn now to our Private Strategies on Slide 13. There's not much we're allowed to say about Private Strategies. But what we can tell you is we continue to monitor and harvest investments in our second fund, lending fund. We're actively assessing new investment opportunities as we invest up our third lending fund, and we have a process of ongoing monitoring of portfolio investments in our streaming product. We're hopeful to be in a position sometime this year to be talking about our next one.

Slide 14. I'll move to Slide 14 with some closing remarks. In summary, with our core strengths in precious metals and critical materials investments, well positioned for the current market conditions. For 2026, we expect more volatility in the markets, certainly, as we've seen recently. For example, in January, we experienced a very, very violent sell-off in precious metals following an exceptional run-up for gold and silver prices.

In our view, this was a healthy and overdue technical correction triggered by speculative investors and algorithmic triggers while the fundamental drivers of the rally remain intact, I think it's an excellent opportunity for those who feel they've missed those rallies to have a better, more sensible reentry point.

Demand for critical materials investments is growing. Governments are becoming increasingly involved in these markets to secure supply and reduce reliance on foreign sources, and we expect this trend to accelerate in 2026 which should drive even greater investor interest in our critical materials strategies. We're very pleased with what we've accomplished in 2025 and remain focused on executing on our growth opportunity -- the growth opportunities ahead of us.

We will continue to drive scale in our physical trust while also explore new ETF launches. At this point, we hope to announce at least 1 new ETF in the first half and a continuing expansion of our product offerings through our partners on HANetf in Europe. We expect the rotation out of AI stocks to continue and investor allocations to natural resource investments to increase. It's early, but we are already seeing a definite pickup in interest in our Managed Equities funds and Private Strategies. We're optimistic this interest will translate into meaningful sales in 2026.

That concludes our remarks for today's call. And I'll now turn it over to the operator for some Q&A. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Etienne Ricard at BMO Capital Markets.

So the improvement in margins this quarter was a highlight for me. Given your ETF platform still represents a relatively small but growing percentage of your assets, how should we think about incremental margins on your ETFs relative to the trust?

Yes, Etienne. It's John. Yes, the beauty of the ETF platform is obviously scale is really helpful in terms of putting funds on platforms and obviously raising larger amounts of capital. The way those funds work is they have unitary fees. Unitary fees are basically fixed fees that don't change for investors. So that's one of the benefits you have total predictability. The benefit for us is that as the assets scale we're able to capture additional margin because many of our service providers and partners have pricing arrangements with us that fall with assets. And it really helps the overall block of assets. But the other thing it really helps with is incremental new funds, which are very costly to launch. They are heavily subsidized, so to speak, with kind of our collective assets.

So bringing new funds to market will become less and less expensive, and we're starting to see the benefit of that. Finally, I think we have almost every single fund in the lineup now above its breakeven AUM level, which is very important. It's very common to have to subsidize a fund in its early years. until it hits those breakeven levels. And I think we've got all but one still below breakeven. So that was a really important milestone.

So the fund lineup is growing very quickly, and we expect that to fall to the bottom line. And every basis point kind of counts in ETFs. So it's all working nicely together.

And I'll just probably add to that. That was a good summary, John. I'd also add to that, that generally speaking, Etienne, I think you made -- you're trying to make the connection between the ETFs and the physicals. The ETFs tend to have higher margin opportunities than the physicals, just given that the fixed cost structure there is a little bit lower than their physical counterparts in that segment. So everything John mentioned is correct and would actually add a little bit more torque to the bottom line to the extent it becomes an increasingly larger portion of the total AUM in that segment, if that helps.

Interesting. And where would be the breakeven level for the ETF?

So every ETF has a different breakeven level, but the primary driver is obviously, it's management fee. And then secondarily, you have to think a little bit about what market it's listed in, whether it's in the U.S. or Europe. Generally, our breakevens can range anywhere from about $25 million, upwards of $75 million. So that's kind of a wide range. But once you get through those breakeven AUMs, you start to actually generate net positive revenue. And that's why it's very important to get the ETFs up to breakeven to start and then scale from there.

Very helpful. And switching gears a little bit. Given precious metals had been out of favor for quite some time, are you now seeing greater competition from other asset managers coming to market with new products that are focused on your end markets?

Yes. Well, I think it's fair to say that the ETF market is mature in the precious metal space. There are a lot of offerings I think I would highlight that the later entrants that came into the market, say, 5, 6 years ago had to come in with a very low price point to compete and gain market share. And I'm talking about price points for, let's say, gold ETFs that are 15, 17, 18 basis points in comparison, we're at 35. So these late entrants had to heavily discount. We have never had to discount our pricing because we believe our product is a premium product given the attributes of it. We don't really see too many new competitors come in the ETF space in the precious metal segments. They're already pretty crowded. We do see new competitors coming in on the mining space, which has been less crowded.

And I would say it's been a similar playbook where people tend to come in at lower price points. We also noticed that many of these entrants don't know anything about metals and mining and produce, I'd say, fairly unsophisticated offerings, which is starting to, I think, we noticed by investors because they're underperforming. So we're finding that we're in a good position to compete. And as I mentioned, even though we run a lot of passive rules-based index strategies, there are clear differences between the two. Our critical materials fund has handily outperformed all of the competitors that we track against our copper mining ETFs have outperformed between 10% and 14% the last 2 years per year.

And so you say, well, if sooner or later, investors are going to notice that something is going on with the Sprott funds. Why are they performing differently. And that's just because we've taken a different approach to our index construction. And we think that's one of the reasons why we've been able to build market share in some of these categories very quickly.

I'll throw one last thing on our active ETFs, both METL and GBUG, they are the first offerings of their kind to -- as an investor, I think the mining industry really offers an opportunity to manage risk actively and there is no other organization that I know of on the planet that has as deep a bench of analysts, portfolio managers, geologists, technicians that are covering this space. So I'm very excited about those launches and the progress we're making there.

Your next question comes from the line of Matt Lee with CGS.

Maybe I want to start on -- sorry, carried interest and performance fees, nice contributor this quarter, something we didn't model in. Can you maybe talk about what drives that? And if we do expect the funds to perform well in 2026, is it assumed that we should receive a similar benefit next year? Or is it more nuanced than that?

Matt, can you just repeat that last part of your question?

Yes. I mean, should we be thinking about a similar kind of performance fee and carried interest revenue line in 2026? Or is it...

Yes. Okay. Got you. Well, it certainly is episodic and it's coming from really two areas. One is the carry, the other side is the performance. On a full year basis, I would say the large chunk of the carrying performance fee that you saw was coming from Managed Equities and specifically on the performance fee side, but there was another good chunk that was coming -- it came in at the second half of -- at the beginning of the second half of the year. from a legacy exploration LP that we had.

So it's kind of difficult to look at this and try to get a sense of where things will be this year because a big chunk of it was legacy and we just harvested it. So that's not going to recur that much of that Q2 number. And then the rest of it is just largely based on how the markets are doing in the case of our active equities or when we get to a point where we're ready to harvest on our Private Strategies side.

So I don't know what to tell you other than to gives you that type of background into just how episodic it can be, but I can't really give you a lot of insight from there, unfortunately.

Okay. That's fair. And then maybe one on the Private Strategies side. I know the portfolio has a lot of fixed income like investments in it. But I'm surprised to see market value there, although only increased by about $5 million, just given how good the macro has been. So can you maybe dig into that a bit and help us understand if anything can drive value up other than net inflows in private?

Okay. Those are private credit funds. And what you're seeing is a function of a strong market where the credits get paid back because the mining companies can raise capital is much cheaper than what they're paying. And so it's always a balance between deploying capital into new investments versus what you get back. As I mentioned, Lending Fund II is coming to the end of its life. So that's going to reduce AUM. But again, this is a -- it's a long cycle. They're 10-year lockup products. And so this is a transition year, I'd say, for the Private Strategies.

And Matt, are you also asking about the -- were you asking about the gains on investments in that segment?

Yes. I'm kind of thinking about that from the perspective of net inflows and market value chains, right? So I think you guys answered that in the net inflows question well. I just -- I'm wondering if there's any changes in the market value of those funds as well.

Yes. So it's exactly as Whitney said, these are loans and so we have to use amortized cost accounting. So we wouldn't be marking them. So it's really just -- any increase you see there is probably from equity kicker enhancements, for example, offset by whatever gains we would get when we pay off the loan debt -- sorry, when the funds have the loans repaid, apologies to that.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Kozak from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Congrats on the record quarter. Two questions from me. First, just at a high level, and I think Whitney, you kind of alluded to it a little bit. But I mean gold and silver prices, they set multiple new all-time highs in the quarter. They're consolidating now, which I agree is healthy. But obviously seem likely to reset here at like a much higher base. And my question is -- my first one is against that backdrop, like how do you guys think about special dividends or maybe even some sort of like dividend linked to a basket of metal prices?

Okay. We have mixed investor opinions about special dividends. I've committed that we're not going to run a money market fund here. To the extent that we have nonrecurring sources of income, that's something we will consider. But I'd like to continue to grow the regular dividend along with our underlying growth. So dividends, buybacks, opportunistic buybacks. Obviously, our stock is very strong. And then ultimately, the special dividend if the first two don't get us where we want to be.

Okay. And then second, maybe just given the extreme volatility in silver prices, both on the upside and the downside in January and February, I'd love if you could give me some color on what the physical market was like? Like where was it tight? Where were the metal flows jurisdictionally and how are these dynamics like now post correction versus, call it, a month ago during that parabolic move to the upside?

That's a fine question, Mike. It's John. Yes. I mean we've obviously seen a pretty extreme volatility in solar. We've never seen those kinds of moves. I think it's fair to say that the physical market was really the catalyst for the move, meaning we saw huge amounts of silver being purchased by investors in India in the fourth quarter. They continue to buy lots of silver. We've seen lots of silver buying a physical form in China in the last few months. And up until very recently, the flows into Western silver-based ETFs was quite strong.

So physical buying kind of was driving the move. Obviously, in the last, I'd say, 3 weeks, that's flipped around. And the paper markets, i.e., options on ETFs and the futures markets have been pushing the price back the other way. So it has been a real tug of war between physical buyers who are thinking more long term. and have been waiting for this re-rating of silver for many, many years. And then other powers that are trying to smash the price down, we see some very abnormal selling behavior where people are dumping huge amounts of silver through paper products and derivatives and 2 minutes of trading or periods of time when markets are closed or on holiday or whatever. So there is some kind of funny business going on.

But in terms of the physical our procurement, we bought a lot of silver. And we're finding there's enough silver to buy in North America. Silver is definitely more scarce in London, in India and China. China has also recently implemented export restrictions on silver, which I think is going to make the market more tight. So the physical market is definitely a little bit mismatched in terms of demand versus interest. And more recently, the large competitor, ETF -- Silver ETF that's listed in the United States has gone in, in the outflows in the last few weeks.

So it's been very volatile. Silver is trying to find a footing here. But it's been very paper-driven versus physical-driven for sure, the last few weeks, but it's definitely moderating. Some regulators have stepped in to kind of rein in some of the speculative activity, namely in China, the CME has raised margin requirements on silver futures contracts multiple times, and that all seems to have some effect here.

Yes. Ultimately, we think it will settle down. Ultimately, the inflation-adjusted all-time high for silver would be somewhere between $180 and $200 an ounce. It's a small market. It's been in supply deficit for 5 years, and it's critical. So I think what we're seeing now is a great opportunity somewhere in this neighborhood for new investors to get involved.

Your next question comes from the line of Graham Ryding with TD Securities.

Maybe you can just touch on those new ETF product launches. Will those be actively managed ETFs or passive strategies around your sort of proprietary indexes or a combination of both? How should we think about those?

Yes. The ones that are in the hopper are both proprietary passive-based indexes. One is a clone of an existing fund that we'd like to bring to Europe. The other one is a brand-new fund that I don't think we're allowed to talk about because we're in a quiet period, but it's on EDGAR. So it is in the public domain. And yes, so we're being very selective. Obviously, we've been pretty aggressive the last few years building out the suite and filling in gaps. And right now, our #1 objective is to scale what we have because that represents the best opportunity to attract assets.

Understood. And is there any commodity that you would call out right now that you sort of feel is positioned to break out? Or are you sort of equally constructive across your main commodities?

Yes. I think our response to that has changed a lot because as I mentioned, multiple metals have all hit all-time highs all at once, which is very abnormal. We're pretty constructive on all of them. They're all taking a bit of a breather right now and consolidating the recent gains, but we think we're still in the early innings. And I think what's really highlighting the value of these metals is the fact that governments are now intervening and talking about strategic stockpiles and price floors and these kinds of mechanisms to basically reshore supply chain away from China.

So it's hard to know how government policies and whatnot are going to affect commodity prices. But I think it's fair to say that most investors have little to no exposure to commodities and the commodities that we're most bullish about are in the mining -- are in the metal space as opposed to traditional energy and agriculture type commodities, which have obviously underperformed big time.

Okay. Great. Maybe just jumping to your sort of the cash on your balance sheet. It's obviously built up quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year in a fairly healthy way. You also have some compensation payable sitting on the liability side. What's the timing around that piece? Should we expect your sort of cash balance to be coming down in Q1 as you pay out some of that or most of that comp payable?

Well, basically, it wouldn't be the following month for the most part.

Okay. And then capital allocation, any obvious uses for net cash build? Or are you sort of happy to keep your cash -- your powder dry and your balance sheet is strong?

We're going to keep a strong balance sheet. That's one of our principles. What we're trying to do is deliver operating leverage without financial leverage to the parts of the world that we operate in. As I mentioned, we'd like to continue to grow the dividends, I'm the second largest shareholder, so I really appreciate that. And again, we will buy back stock depending and be opportunistic and depending on the value that we can get will depend on how much we can deploy there. And then we'll revisit where we are later this year.

Okay. Great. And one more, if I could be greedy, just on the Private Strategies side. You talked about looking at doing some fundraising. Would that be to replace that LF2 fund? Or are you looking to add incremental AUM to that overall part of your business?

Yes. We want to continue to cycle through our lending products, but we also have some very interesting Private Strategies that are starting to scale. One is in physical commodities that do not trade on any exchanges, run by Ryan McIntyre. We have introduced an evergreen version of our lending product, which I think is a concept that's gaining traction in the private credit world. And we continue to have people's attention now with our mining -- special metals and minings fund, given its performance, not just last year, but over 5 years.

So there are lots of opportunities on the private part of our business, and we are increasingly heavily engaged with family offices and large high net worth investors. I didn't mentioned that our wealth management business more than doubled in assets last year, a lot on the back of performance. But again, we were getting calls and things like that, that we haven't seen in years and years from high net worth investors. So that part of our business, which has been sort of a rounding error, is starting to grow nicely as well.

And then my last one, just on that Lending Fund II. You talked about sort of it's in a harvesting phase. Does that sort of imply that 2026 could generate some carried interest around that fund?

We are not allowed to say anything.

Your next question comes from the line of Bart Dziarski from RBC Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask around the net comp ratio. So it was about 45% last year, it's 40% this year, and it was lower than that in Q4. So just trying to get a sense what run rate should we assume for that ratio going forward?

Bart, Kevin here. we don't provide forward-looking information, obviously, the kind of standard statement. But what I can say is the key drivers for us are, one, obviously, revenue growth, obviously, as the denominator, but also just keeping in mind that there's not an awful lot of torque to the cash comp side as it relates to our net revenue growth. And you can just see that when you look at the MD&A explanations that we give around compensation pre-stock based relative to the net revenue growth. So whatever you're seeing now, if you wanted to keep that and maybe kind of flat or a bit throughout the year and then maybe only toggle it down commensurate with any future net revenues we may or may not report then you're welcome to do that. And I can't imagine you'd be massively off, if you took that approach. But I can't actually specifically give you anything to rely on.

Okay. No, that's helpful, Kevin. And then John, in your prepared remarks, you talked about AUM and liquidity begets AUM and liquidity. And it's an interesting point that we probably underappreciate. So can you maybe elaborate a little bit on that? And then tying into that, you're saying on the back of it, you're seeing more and more institutions allocate. So just more color on what institutions, where, and the momentum you're seeing there?

Yes, sure. Bart. So yes, I guess I would view it from two perspectives. One is from a product shelf placement perspective. So for example, some distributors won't turn your ETF tickers on until you hit a threshold of AUM, sometimes it's $25 million, sometimes it can be even as high as $100 million. So that's thing one. You need to hit those milestones for distributors to turn them on. And then secondarily, institutional investors obviously have some limitations in terms of their comfort level in terms of owning a percentage of a fund.

So as these funds get bigger, they trade more and institutions feel more comfortable putting on positions of size. So it does create a bit of a flywheel effect. You also tend to see bid-ask spreads tighten, which helps the trading. And you just have to be patient because you could have a fund that's sitting there at $10 million for months and months and then all of a sudden, somebody is interested in it, and it will jump up to $100 million in no time. And we've recently seen that with our nickel miners ETF and our lithium miners ETFs as well.

And I think where we see the real big flywheel effect is obviously in the multibillion dollar funds, and that's where institutions that we talk to, pension funds, family offices, hedge funds, et cetera. That's where they can get materially positioned with large positions. So those are the kind of the workhorse funds for us. The uranium trust is a good example that has the highest percentage of institutional ownership amongst the physical products. And as that fund gets bigger, you get to talk to bigger and bigger institutions that can allocate to it.

At this time, I will turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for participating in this call. We appreciate your interest in Sprott and look forward to speaking to you again after our first quarter results. Until then, we will remain contrarian, innovative and aligned. Have a good day.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. We thank you for attending, and you may now disconnect your lines.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Sprott Inc.'s 2025 Third Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, November 5, 2025. On behalf of the speakers that follow, listeners are cautioned that today's presentation and the responses to questions may contain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws.

Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Certain material factors or assumptions are implied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements.

For additional information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and about material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements, please consult the MD&A for the quarter and Sprott's other filings with the Canadian and U.S. securities regulators. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Whitney George. Please go ahead, Mr. George.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 3. Thanks for joining us today. On the call with me is our CFO, Kevin Hibbert; and John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott Asset Management.

Our 2025 third quarter results were released this morning and are available on our website where you can also find the financial statements and MD&A.

On Slide 4, I'd like to review our third quarter and year-to-date highlights. Our assets under management increased by $9 billion during the quarter, driven by surging gold and silver prices. In October, subsequent to the quarter end, our AUM surpassed $50 billion for the first time. We reported strong sales during the third quarter, driven by interest in both precious metals and critical materials.

Our managed equities business has delivered outstanding performance, both during the quarter and on a year-to-date basis with some strategies up more than 100% as of October 31. The active ETFs we launched earlier this year to leverage our strength -- the strength of our investment team have been among our most successful ETF launches to date.

Since we acquired the Sprott Uranium Miners ETF in 2022, our ETF business has grown from under $400 million in assets to more than $4.4 billion today. Given the strength of our financial results and our confidence in Sprott's future, yesterday, our Board declared a third quarter dividend of $0.40 per share, an increase of 33%.

And finally, today, we announced that we have strengthened our executive team with the appointments of Ryan McIntyre as President, and Kevin Hibbert and Arthur Einav as co-COOs of Sprott, while retaining their current positions as Chief Counsel and CFO, respectively.

On behalf of our Board and the entire Sprott team, I'd like to congratulate Ryan, Kevin and Arthur on these appointments. And with that, I'll pass it over to Kevin for a look at our financial results. Kevin?

Thank you, Whitney, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 5, which provides a summary of our historical AUM. AUM finished the quarter at $49.1 billion, up 23% from $40 billion at June 30 and up 56% from $31.5 billion as at December 31, 2024.

On a 3 and 9 months ended basis, we benefited from strong market value appreciation across our fund products and positive net inflows to our physical trusts. As Whitney noted, subsequent to quarter end, on October 31, our AUM was $51 billion, up 4% from our September 30 AUM level.

Our performance subsequent to the quarter end was the result of $1.2 billion of market value appreciation and $793 million in net inflows to our physical trusts. Slide 6 provides a brief look at our 3- and 9-month earnings. Net income this quarter was $13.2 million, up 4% from $12.7 million over the same 3-month period last year. And on a year-to-date basis, net income was $38.6 million, up 3% from $37.6 million this time last year.

Our net income performance was primarily due to a change in accounting requirements brought on by our new cash-settled stock plan that took effect this year, largely offsetting much of the net income we otherwise generated on market value appreciation and inflows into our precious metals physical trusts and carried interest and performance fee crystallizations in our managed equities segment.

As we discussed last quarter, cash-settled stock plans like the one we implemented this year require the use of mark-to-market and graded vest accounting under IFRS 2, which created transitional accounting noise for us in the form of accelerated vesting that occurs in the early years of the program, i.e., we have to expense 60% of the total cash settled RSUs under our 3-year program in 2025 alone and then 30% in 2026 and the final 10% in 2027.

This compares to only 1/3 increments annually under our former equity settled program. And the second way in which this transition accounting noise impacts our net income is by adding market volatility to each accelerated vested amount and at a time when our stock has appreciated 97% on a year-to-date basis. So suffice it to say that our actual after-tax settlement obligation will be a fraction of these IFRS 2 derived amounts.

Adjusted EBITDA, on the other hand, which excludes quarterly volatility from items like stock-based compensation and carried interest and performance fee crystallizations was $31.9 million in the quarter, up 54% from $20 million over the same 3-month period last year and was $79.3 million on a year-to-date basis, up 26% from $62.8 million this time last year. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter and on a year-to-date basis from higher average AUM on market value appreciation and [indiscernible] inflows to our Precious Metals physical Trust. Finally, Slide 7 provides a few treasury and balance sheet management highlights. And as you can see, our cash and liquidity profile remains quite strong.

And to Whitney's point, given the strength of our earnings, our free cash flow and overall outlook, our Board has declared a third quarter dividend of $0.40 per share, which is a 33% increase from the second quarter level. For more information on our revenues, expenses, net income, adjusted EBITDA and balance sheet metrics, you can refer to the supplemental information section of this presentation as well as our quarterly MD&A and financial statements filed earlier this morning. So with that said, I'll pass things over to John.

Thanks, Kevin, and good morning, everybody. Just turning to Slide 8. Our physical trusts finished October at $39.4 billion and now represent 76% of our overall AUM. Year-to-date, the growth has been tremendous at plus $15.4 billion or 64% with strong gains across the metals complex. As I've mentioned on previous calls, scale and liquidity are critical to attract institutional investors into our funds, and we believe we are still in the early phase of institutional investors allocating to metals.

We are also seeing some new use cases for our trusts. For example, our Silver Trust, PSLV has experienced very high trading volumes of late as silver and ETF market participants are now using PSLV as a short-term trading and hedging instrument.

In early September, the uranium Gold and Silver Trust became the first closed-end funds in Canada to have listed options on them. This is most significant for Sprott as it's now the only listed uranium investment vehicle in the world with options and open interest continues to grow. The scale and liquidity effect not only makes the funds more investable to ever larger institutions, but it also provides very valuable operating leverage, and we're starting to see the benefits with our margins being enhanced.

Turning to Slide 9. We've often spoken about the ideal environment for our business, which is to have multiple metals working at the same time. While we've previously experienced periods where 1 or 2 metals are working together, we are currently experiencing an environment where just about all metals are benefiting from 2 powerful macro trends. The first trend is related to the geopolitical fractures being created as the global trading system is being reordered, precious metals as well as critical metals are the primary beneficiaries. The second trend is related to the AI infrastructure build-out, which will require significantly more energy, namely electricity.

The generation, transmission and storage of electricity will be very mineral intensive, benefiting a wide range of metals and mining companies. These macro drivers are unlikely to be transitory as they represent pivotal shifts in energy and industrial policies. They also highlight the strategic importance of critical material supply chains, energy security, national security and the shift to dedollarized foreign exchange reserves by central banks. So far in 2025, we have already achieved higher net flows than our previous full year record, which was achieved in 2021.

I'd like to highlight our net flows in the month of September, where we recorded our highest ever monthly sales number. What's more impressive is that we achieved this with 18 different funds contributing with positive sales. Our previous record in February 2021 was achieved largely from one fund, the Silver Trust. Our sales results reflect broad and growing interest in our funds and confirms the benefits of making the strategic decision in 2021 to extend our suite of funds to a broader range of metals and listing ETFs across multiple jurisdictions.

Turning to Slide 10, our ETF product suite, very sharp AUM growth this year at plus 83%. Most of our ETFs now exceed breakeven AUM levels, which is very important for profitability. And we're also experiencing the same scale and liquidity effect as the funds grow in size, they are gaining access to ever more distribution platforms.

Most of our ETFs have unitary or fixed fees, so scale helps to improve our profitability as many of our operating expenses scale down with size. And then finally, turning to Slide 11. Q3 represented the 16th consecutive quarter of positive flows. One ETF I'd like to highlight is the Sprott Silver Miners and Physical Silver ETF. The ticker is SLVR on the NASDAQ. We launched SLVR in January, and the ETF is already having very good success in taking market share from long-standing incumbents.

AUM is currently $350 million and represents one of our fastest-growing new ETF launches. We continue to experience some redemptions from our uranium mining ETFs as investors have been chasing some high-flying stocks in the downstream segment of the nuclear fuel supply chain. We believe that uranium mining stocks are well positioned to benefit from the ever-growing supply deficit, which doesn't seem to be solvable in anytime soon. And with that, I'll turn it over to Whitney.

Thanks, John. We'll move now to Slide 12 for a look at our managed equity segment. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, our managed equity strategies have performed well this year. Our flagship gold equity fund was up 44% during the quarter and has gained 105% year-to-date. We are pleased with the early response to our 2 active ETF launches. In recent years, investors have demonstrated a clear preference for ETFs over traditional mutual funds.

Actively managed ETFs offer an excellent way for us to leverage the strength of our investment team in an ETF format. Investing in mining comes with a number of risks, and we think they're best mitigated through active management, and we'll continue to look for new ways to showcase that expertise. I'll now turn to private strategies on Slide 13.

Private Strategies AUM was $2.1 billion, unchanged from June 30. The team continues to assess new investment opportunities for Lending Fund III and is actively monitoring our streaming and royalty portfolio investments.

Slide 14, for some closing remarks. To recap, we are pleased with what we have accomplished so far this year. AUM has increased by nearly $20 billion, driven by rising precious metals prices and more than $3.5 billion in net sales. The rise in gold and silver prices has been dramatic and the recent technical correction was not unexpected.

However, our view is while gold may be technically overbought, it is chronically under-owned. Despite recent inflows into physically backed gold, ETFs, most U.S. investors are still significantly underweight gold in their portfolios. Just a slight increase in this allocation could have a dramatic impact on the price.

At the same time, price insensitive buying from central banks is likely to persist as it is driven by ongoing restructuring -- the ongoing restructuring of global trade and military alliances. The appeal of precious metals increases in uncertain times, and we expect the reshaping of the current world order to continue for some time with the ultimate outcome unknown. The outlook for critical materials is equally compelling. The U.S. government has ramped up its intervention in critical materials markets throughout 2025, implementing a multipronged strategy to secure supply and reduce reliance on foreign sources, particularly China.

The Trump administration is moving aggressively on this track, even taking equity positions in critical material miners. Not to be outdone, the big banks are also getting in on the act. JPMorgan recently launched a $1.5 trillion security and resiliency initiative aimed at bolstering U.S. national security through strategic investments in critical industries.

In closing, we are pleased to be delivering steadily improving results and investment performance. With our core positioning in precious metals and critical materials, we believe we are well positioned to benefit from the powerful global trends outlined above. That concludes our remarks for today's call, and I'll now turn it over to the operator for some Q&A. Operator?

Your first question comes from the line of Matt Lee at CGF.

Just one from me. Over the quarter, it seems like the spot price of uranium has ticked up and you've been pretty active in terms of picking up volumes. I just have a logistical question. Can you just talk about how challenging it's been to source material, particularly when the market is tight like it is today?

Matt, it's John. Yes, I mean, it's been pretty amazing because, obviously, the trust wasn't trading well for the first few months of the year, falling out -- fall out from the liberation day and uncertainty. Since late June, I think we've purchased about 7 million pounds of uranium in the spot market. So we've been very active. We're very focused on filling our allocation before the year-end, which is 9 million pounds under the current prospectus.

There's always material in the spot market. It's lumpy. It's hard to find at times, but there's material. And I think what has influenced the availability of material so far this year is we don't see producers coming in the spot market in a meaningful way to buy. We don't see utilities coming into the spot market with the exception of 1 or 2 in a meaningful way. So we've been able to kind of soak up the pounds, which is fine with us because at current levels, we find it incredibly attractive to be buying uranium at $80. The term price is now at a multiyear high. It's ticked up to $86.

I think that's a very good sign. And we're seeing a lot of utilities come back to market after largely standing on the sidelines as they're waiting for some clarity from the Trump administration on just about everything.

So we're very constructive. We've raised about $700 million in the uranium trust since May. And I think that is a very strong vote of confidence in the market as well as the vehicle.

Your next question comes from the line of Etienne Ricard from BMO Capital Markets.

So it's great to see the growth to your ETF franchise. Historically, physical trust accounted for the vast majority of your AUM. Now to the extent ETF's become more meaningful as a percentage of the mix, how do you expect this to impact the volatility of net flows through the cycle?

Can you take that one?

I can take that one. Yes. Etienne, it's John here again. Yes, look, I mean, obviously, we've got 2 different dynamics. The physical trusts are obviously physical metals, and they obviously are not as volatile day-to-day and year-to-year as the underlying mining stocks, which represent the vast majority of the ETF exposure.

What we obviously are seeing is kind of a staged approach where institutions put their toe in the water typically with an allocation to the physical because they've got a constructive view on the commodity itself. And then what we see them doing typically is to transition into some allocation into the equities. They're starting to do that.

Obviously, there's a lot of capital flowing into the mining sector after a multiyear drought. And as Whitney mentioned, you've got governments now taking equity stakes in exchange for offtake agreements, loans and whatnot. So we haven't seen this dynamic in the mining sector, and we would expect the mining stocks to be bigger beneficiaries going forward here with -- on the back of renewed capital flows into the sector and obviously, governments are sending some very strong signals. Equity flows, they're more volatile for sure, but it comes with the territory. So it's nice to have a diversified suite between physical and mining across multiple, obviously, metals and jurisdictions. That's one way we can help to dampen the volatility.

Okay. I appreciate the details. And just to circle back on this morning's executive appointments, William. Why was this the right time to make this announcement? And how do you think about leadership planning as part of the regular risk management procedures?

Well, I think the Board felt that the best time to think about the long-term future of the leadership is when things are going well as opposed to when you're in a more difficult environment. And certainly, this year, things have been going very well.

So they hired an outside consultant to do an extensive review and profile of our existing leadership. And it came out very well, obviously, we're very pleased with -- I'm very pleased with my partners.

And so again, I think what we wanted to signal to the market is the importance -- the important roles that Kevin and Arthur have contributed over time and the fact that they do more than just their initial titles of Chief Financial Officer and Head of Legal as for Arthur and because they really have been performing co-Chief Operating Officer roles for some time.

And then Ryan is a fairly new addition to the team and has a lot of investment experience, has been President of a public company in his prior career and is a valuable member, and we'd like to highlight his contribution and presence to investors.

Your next question comes from the line of Graham Ryding at TD Securities.

Can you give us a feel for flows in the quarter and also October to date, just sort of the mix between retail and institutional? And can you maybe reiterate the case for -- it sounds like you think institutional demand is positioned to increase here?

Yes. Graham, John again. Yes, I mean, obviously, September was a record high for us. We've continued that momentum through most of October. Obviously, we hit a bit of an air pocket with a number of different categories on the back of escalating trade tensions with China and clearly some profit taking.

We were quite extended technically. But I think it's important to note that the interest is growing. It's very broad. We're getting inbounds from everyone from family offices to institutions to registered investment advisers in the United States. We're seeing much more institutional allocation to the space.

And to be candid, I mean, a lot of these institutions have had little to no exposure to the -- these categories for the last 10 years. So it's been a long time in the making, and we are working very, very actively to ensure we get our fair share of those flows. And we're very pleased with the result. The team has been incredibly busy talking to investors around the world.

And we would expect institutions to continue to be the bulk of the allocations, but we're obviously seeing capital coming from advice channels and also individual investors, which you can't discount because there's a very large group of them out there that are more self-directed.

So sorry, the flows in Q3 and Q4 to date have been largely institutional driven or you're saying it's a mix?

It's a mix for sure. I mean we don't have total transparency, obviously, with exchange-traded funds. So we have to self-identify, and we're obviously engaging with institutions and advice channel participants day-to-day. But it's a good mix. And I think it's been more skewed to institutional and advice channels thus far.

Okay. That's helpful. Tokenization of sort of real assets seems to be a theme that's gathering momentum. Is that something you've looked at all like the idea of token backed by physical bullion, could that potentially open up a portion of the retail market that's maybe focused on digital assets, but not so much on precious metals or critical minerals? Have you looked at that?

My predecessor made a variety of investments in digital gold. They were a little early. They didn't really work out. We've been watching it now very closely for -- since I've been here for 10 years. But in order -- in these new stable coins, in order to back the stable coins, you need the physical metal.

And so we're paying very close attention. It could be a new factor, a new buying cohort of gold, in particular, on top of institutions and on top of the central banks that were underpinning it. But it will benefit our products one way or the other if people want gold back stable coins. We are watching it. We obviously have a strong brand in the space. We have a lot of technical expertise when it comes to purchasing and storage. But we lack some of the technology elements that you need to do to get into various cryptos.

But there does seem to be a convergence now between the Bitcoins and physical gold in terms of people's investment. And even now with stable coins, they are more closely convergence where one can drive the other as opposed to be competing ways to get money out of the control of central banks.

Okay. Interesting. And then private strategies, any update there on like expected fundraising? Or sort of should we expect you to just sort of maintain and sort of harvest the AUM at these levels? How should we think about that part of your business?

Well, Fund II is very mature and probably in wind down. Fund III is still in the investment phase. And once we make some more progress on that, we can consider another product. So we're committed to that business. It's sort of lagged the rest of our business and maybe has an opportunity for a little focus in the next year to catch back up again.

Great. And if I could get one more, just to be a little greedy. You've got $80 million of cash on your balance sheet. You've got some other liquidity that you flagged. What's your plan there? Are you happy to sort of sit with elevated liquidity or do you have a plan for allocating that?

I'm committed to not building a money market fund. I think the dividend increase is a pretty strong indicator of how we view cash. Again, dividends that -- we are hopeful one day, there might be another acquisition or 2 out there. And we're hoping to grow the private business, which requires some co-investment, and we will continue to be buyers of our own shares opportunistically.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Kozak from Cantor Fitzgerald.

GBP 9 million of purchases you can make in any given year. My question was, and this actually came in from an account the other day. Does that GBP 9 million, does that reset on Jan 1 every calendar year? Or is it like a rolling 12-month number? Because I think you're already at GBP 7.5 million for this calendar year or thereabouts. So you're bumping up against it.

Yes. Mike, it's John. Yes, that basically covers calendar years and the base shelf prospectus will expire at the end of January next year. So in the coming weeks, we will be starting the process to file a new prospectus. And our expectation is we will be able to roll that amount forward, but we haven't started that engagement yet. And we still have runway to continue to buy between now and the end of the prospectus. So it's business as usual.

Okay. That's helpful. The second question I had was approximately how much of the uranium trust inventory is held at ConverDyn? And then as a smaller subset of that, what -- I suspect it's small, but what percentage would be of U.S. origin approximately? And the reason I ask is with U.S. government or various agencies increasingly getting involved in critical minerals, there's increasing chatter on my end anyway that there's a very real possibility that you're going to get some sort of bifurcated pricing on uranium, whereby U.S. origin or U.S. domiciled material get some sort of fixed premium pricing set by a government agency, similar to like what we saw with NDPR. So I just want to get a sense of where the inventories are at ConverDyn and what percent approximately would be of U.S. origin, if you can?

Yes. Okay. Interesting questions for sure. So out of our 72 million-odd pounds that we're holding, there's very little U.S. origin. And the reason is simple. There was obviously multiple years where there was no uranium mining in the United States. And as you know, even this year, it's going to be quite de minimis relative to annual requirements. Now let's take a step back.

Obviously, in the Biden administration, the Department of Energy undertook the first step towards building a strategic uranium reserve. They had a grand total of $75 million to procure uranium. They went out, bought 1 million pounds. They ended up paying way over spot for U.S. origins that obviously was historically mined material sitting above ground. And I think more interestingly, in September at the IAEA, Chris Wright, the Department of Energy Secretary stated again the need for a strategic uranium reserve, which is obviously fanning a lot of speculation.

Obviously, the U.S. is trying to reshore the entire supply chain. They're most focused on enrichment and conversion, obviously, made a huge announcement last week around the Westinghouse new build. And obviously, they're trying to resuscitate U.S. mining. We could see a 2-tiered pricing environment where if the U.S. government is willing to pay a premium for U.S. origin, that is entirely possible. We have seen in the past, bifurcated markets, mostly many decades ago kind of during the cold war.

I think it's important to note that the U.S. is clearly focused on the reality that they are largely sourcing all of their uranium from outside the country. And obviously, with the recent announcement, their aspirations to build even more reactors is compounding. So it will be to be determined whether funds are procured to start building a strategic uranium reserve. In terms of where we're storing our material, we're only allowed to store in the 3 Western license conversion facilities. That's the Cameco facility, the Orano facility in France and the ConverDyn facility in the United States. If memory serves me, we have about 20-ish percent at ConverDyn. And the bulk of it is in Canada at this point.

I think the main point I would leave you with is the U.S. is very focused on building its supply chain by building capacity locally. You're seeing them make investments, obviously, in enrichment facilities with Orano, with Urenco, with Westinghouse. They want to resuscitate mining. They're fast tracking, mining permitting. And I think what they're focused on is production and building capacity along the supply chain.

Okay. That's helpful. And then one more, if I could, switching gears on silver. I'd love if you could give me some color on the tightness in the physical silver market from last month. There was all kinds of articles about, well, the potential squeeze on the physical metal, I think that the silver futures curve was in backwardation there for a few days.

There's reports about traders chartering private planes taking physical silver from London to New York. And I think PSLV was issuing and buying in the market over that period. So any color you could give me on the physical silver market would be appreciated.

Yes. I think we're probably one of the largest buyers of physical silver in the world over the last 5 years. So we obviously have a lot of insights into what's going on there. And yes, a few weeks ago, there was clearly a dislocation, but the dislocation was really driven by a mismatch of inventories in different jurisdictions. So shortage of metal in London, which is the primary market and a surplus of metal in the COMEX markets, which is U.S. based.

And there is a point in time where the pricing differential between those 2 markets incentivizes putting metal on ships, which is the primary way to move silver around, not airplanes like gold and move it across the pond and to capture that arbitrage. That is obviously happening. There's at least 30 million -- excuse me, 30 million ounces of silver that have left COMEX Vault in the last few weeks. And the situation is starting to abate in terms of that dislocation. But clearly, too much metal left London when there was concern about tariffs, which ultimately did not transpire. And now that metal is stuck and needs to go back.

We've actually been big beneficiaries of that dislocation because as we've been raising money, we've been able to buy inventory that's stuck in the U.S. that people want to get rid of. So we've had no issues sourcing metal and a lot of the London metal is moving on to India where it seems as though it's relentless there in terms of how much silver people in India want to own right now. So it is abating, but I'd say it was actually a big help to us.

Thank you. At this time, I will turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for participating on this call. We appreciate your interest in Sprott. We remain contrarian, innovative and aligned and look forward to speaking to you again after our fourth quarter results.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. We thank you for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Sprott Inc.'s 2025 Second Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, August 6, 2025. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mr. Whitney George. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I'm starting on Slide 3. On the call with me today is our CFO, Kevin Hibbert; and John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott Asset Management. As you can see from Slide 3, all the turmoil has not aged us a bit. Our 2025 second quarter results were released this morning and are available on our website where you can also find the financial statements and MD&A.

Slide 4. 2025 continues to be an eventful year. Since the April 2 Liberation Day tariff announcements, we have witnessed extreme volatility in all markets. A 20% correction in the S&P 500 Index, followed by a full recovery to new highs in 1 quarter is extreme, but not unexpected. As I noted in this quarter's letter to shareholders, we expect more of the same going forward. In the short term, we don't know what comes next, and we will avoid making any predictions.

Turning now to our results. I'm pleased to report that our Assets Under Management increased by $5 billion in the second quarter to $40 billion. Net sales continued to accelerate during the quarter due to the rising interest in multiple metals. In addition to strong ETFs [Technical Difficulty] precious metals physical trust, we also completed 2 capital raises in the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, which John will speak to more about in a few minutes. Our Managed Equity strategies continued to perform well, delivering strong results in the quarter and over the first half of 2025 and we also benefited from carried interest and performance fees crystallization in our Managed Equities segment.

Earlier this year, we launched 2 new precious metals ETFs, and we are very pleased with the early results from these strategies. The Sprott Active Gold and Silver Miners ETF, our first actively managed ETF and the Sprott Silver Miners and Physical Silver ETF have been 2 of our most successful ETF launches to date hitting key AUM thresholds more quickly than any of our previous.

With that, I'll pass it over to Kevin for a look at financial results. Kevin?

Thanks, Whitney, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 5, which provides a summary of our historical AUM. AUM finished the quarter, as Whitney noted, at $40 billion, up 14% from $35.1 billion as at March 31, 2025, and up 27% from $31.5 billion as at December 31, 2024. On a 3- and 6 months ended basis, we benefited from positive market value appreciation across the majority of our fund products and positive net inflows to our physical trusts.

Slide 6 provides a brief look at our 3- and 6-month earnings. Net income this quarter was $13.5 million, up 1% from $13.4 million over the same 3-month period last year. On a year-to-date basis, net income was $25.5 million, up 2% from $24.9 million this time last year. Our flat net income performance was caused by a change in accounting requirements brought on by our new cash-settled stock plan that took effect this year largely offsetting much of the net income we otherwise generated on market appreciation and flows into our physical trusts and carried interest and performance fee crystallization in our Managed Equity segment.

By way of background, cash settled stock plans like the one we implemented this year require the use of mark-to-market and graded vest accounting under IFRS 2 which creates the dual impact of accelerating the amount of vesting that occurs each period and adding market volatility to each vested amount. In our case, at a time when our stock has appreciated 54% in the quarter and 64% on a year-to-date basis. In contrast, last year, we had an equity settled stock program, that required each vest to be valued at the original grant date fair value on a constant basis over the entire amortization period.

Adjusted EBITDA, on the other hand, which excludes quarterly volatility from items such as stock-based compensation, FX volatility and intermittent carried interest and performance fee crystallizations was $25.5 million for the quarter, up 14% from $22.4 million over the same 3-month period last year and was $47.4 million on a year-to-date basis, up 12% from $42.1 million this time last year.

Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter and on a year-to-date basis benefited from higher average AUM on market value appreciation and inflows to our precious metals physical trust. However, offsetting these positives was our finance income being down due to last year's higher syndication fees and our net commissions also being down due to last year's Copper Trust IPO and higher ATM activity in our Physical Uranium Trust.

Finally, Slide 7 provides a few treasury and balance sheet management highlights, and as you can see there, our cash and liquidity profile remains quite strong. For more information on our revenues, expenses, net income, adjusted EBITDA and balance sheet metrics, you can refer to the supplemental information section of this presentation as well as our quarterly MD&A and financial statements filed earlier this morning.

With that said, I'll pass things over to John.

Thanks, Kevin, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us. We enjoyed a very strong operating results in the second quarter. As Kevin mentioned, with significant asset growth in our physical trusts product suite. A combination of market appreciation and net flows contributed to this growth. Gold, silver, platinum, palladium and uranium were all solid performers in the quarter. AUM was $31 billion as of August 1, which represents an all-time high for the physical trusts product suite.

As the funds continue to grow in size, they benefit from an important scale effect, which drives liquidity which in turn begets liquidity. This is critical in order to attract more institutional capital as they begin to reallocate to the metal sector. Next slide, please.

We enjoyed our strongest sales quarter in the past 3 years, driven by renewed interest as we said in multiple metals. Our business tends to produce the best results when multiple metals are working at the same time. As we discussed in previous quarters, metals like silver are finally experiencing a catch-up trade with gold. Silver remains undervalued relative to gold and is still well off its 2011 high. Since the beginning of 2021, our Physical Silver Trust has captured over 100% of net flows amongst U.S. listed peers, allowing us to grow our market share of assets meaningfully.

Shifting over to uranium. Our Uranium Trust completed 2 novel capital raises, which were well supported by institutional investors. With the proceeds, Sprott has accumulated another 2 million pounds of uranium bringing our overall stockpile to 68.4 million pounds. And since the inception of Sprott 4 years ago, we have now purchased a total of 50 million pounds of uranium.

Moving to Slide 10. Shifting to our suite of ETFs. We've seen a nice recovery in AUM since the market lows in early April. Assets have rebounded to $3 billion. We have been extremely pleased with the initial market reception for our 2 latest ETF launches, the Sprott Silver Miners and Physical Silver ETF, ticker SLVR, is off to a very strong start with assets of approximately $170 million. And just for context, there are so many new ETFs coming to market -- new ETFs in their first year of life somewhere -- attract somewhere around $5 million, just to put it into context.

Our first actively managed ETF, the Sprott Active Gold and Silver Miners ETF is also gaining traction and is approaching $50 million. We believe there are strong opportunities to grow our market share with both of these new ETFs and obviously, they're very scalable.

Moving to Slide 11 to talk about ETF flows. Overall, it was a solid quarter despite mixed results by product type. The precious metals mining ETFs are driving most of the flows, while the uranium mining ETFs have been under some redemption pressure of late. We attribute this to some investors shifting to the downstream segment of the nuclear energy sector as more market participants understand that we are entering another nuclear renaissance period. We expect this to be transitory as the price of uranium still remains quite low in our opinion and the uranium mining stocks represent good value to capture that upside.

And with that, I'm going to pass it over to William.

Thank you, John. We'll move now to Slide 12 for a look at our managed equity segment. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, our managed equity strategies have performed well this year. Our flagship gold equity fund was up 15.5% during the quarter and has gained 46% year-to-date. However, flows continue to lag performance and we reported $61 million in net redemptions during the quarter and $81 million on a year-to-date basis.

One of the reasons we launched Sprott's Active Gold and Silver Miners ETF was to capitalize on investors' current preference for ETFs over mutual funds. GBUG, it allows strength of our investment team in an active strategy within an ETF wrapper, which is more transparent and tax efficient for investors. We are pleased with the early response to this new strategy, which actually yesterday just surpassed $50 million in AUM. Looking ahead, we expect to launch at least one additional active ETF before the end of 2025.

I'll turn now to the private strategies on Slide 13. Private strategies AUM was $2.1 billion, down slightly from March 31, 2025. The decline reflects a net decrease in investments quarter-over-quarter, new investments less distributions to our partners across the lending and streaming and royalty segments. The team continues to assess new investment opportunities for Lending Fund III and is actively monitoring our streaming and royalty portfolio investments.

Slide 14. To recap, we're pleased with our results over the first half of 2025. AUM has increased $8.5 billion year-to-date, driven by rising metal prices as well as $1.6 billion in net sales. Metal markets are experiencing a new kind of scarcity, which is placing upward pressure on prices. The global trade and inventory system for some metals is starting to break down due to geopolitical tensions, protectionist trade policies and resource nationalism. The result is greater volatility in spreads, higher regional price differences and a long-term premium on strategically essential metals.

Gold has set a new series of record price [indiscernible] out to a 12-year high and Platinum was recently at its highest level in 10 years. Prices may stay elevated even without significant changes in traditional supply-demand metrics because it's become harder for metals to flow freely around the world.

At Sprott, we're fortunate to be extremely well positioned to create value for our clients and our shareholders with an asset base divided between precious metals and critical materials investments. We look forward to reporting to you on our progress in the quarters ahead.

That concludes our remarks for today's call, and I'll now turn it over to the operator for some Q&A. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Matt Lee from CG.

Maybe starting with the housekeeping one. Can I just ask you how you determine the market value changes in private strategies? Like is it that market-to-market? Or is it recognized on the underlying investments to reach maturity?

Matt, it's Kevin here. Good question. So the accounting requires -- because they're loans, we have to use pull-to-par accounting. So it's basically amortized cost, but we also believe that amortized cost is a reasonable proxy for market.

But some of them have like equity components, right, in the private strategies. And inevitably, if it's gold related and given how well the gold market has done, in theory, there's some market appreciation that's not captured in that market value change.

Well, the market -- so when you're dealing with those types of equity kickers, those equity kickers actually come out and then you have the pull-to-par accounting, that will get you back up to that ultimate amortized cost value. So in times like this, to your point, where the market value has gone up a fair bit, you will see some of that, but the equity kickers tend to make up a relatively smaller portion of the overall value of those loans.

All right. Got it. That's helpful. And then maybe can you just give us an idea of what you're seeing in the uranium market in general? Spot market does seem to have pulled back a bit in the last month. But if you read the news, U.S. executive orders, international demand, both seem to point towards kind of an upswing. Is that kind of what you mean when you're saying there's going to be a nuclear renaissance on the way?

Matthew, it's John. Yes, sure, I'd love to pick up on that. Yes, I think it's fair to say that the -- there's been kind of a disconnect between the physical uranium market and the overwhelming shift of energy policy support back to nuclear energy over the last 3 years? Most of that disconnect has been in the last 12 months, and it's been related to largely uncertainty around, obviously, the incoming administration. It was also in part to the price of uranium dumping very sharply in 2023 and early 2024, which I think made some utilities cautious about chasing the price.

Now that we have some clarity in terms of the Trump administration's position with the 4 executive orders, which were incredibly holistic and beneficial for the sector as well as clarity on tariffs, which were not applied to uranium products or related fuel services, I think it's -- we're really set up right now for utilities to come back to market. And I'll just share a quick stat with you, which I think is very important. The industry basically operates through long-term purchase agreements. And to August 4 year-to-date, the industry has signed a grand total of 30 million pounds of contracts for future delivery. That's about 1/3 of replacement rate so far year-to-date. So it really signaled that utilities have not been actively buying. They've been on the sidelines because of all the distraction and noise, but we just yesterday got an early sign that a Korean utility came to market through a public RFP process for almost 9 million pounds of uranium that they're looking for.

And we're now moving into the seasonal start of the contracting cycle, which starts with the World Nuclear Association Conference, which is going to start the first week of September. So we think that the utilities are finally starting to emerge from their hibernation and the price and the term market and the spot market should respond accordingly to that.

Our next question comes from Etienne Ricard from BMO Capital Markets.

I'd like to cover copper. The Physical Trust is trading at quite a discount to NAV. I'm curious what do you think needs to happen for this discount to narrow? And more broadly, how is the current volatility to trade policies impacting demand for the Copper Trust?

Yes. Etienne, it's John. I'll cover that. Well, the most notable thing about the copper market, which I'll start with, has obviously been up until a few days ago, the dislocation between CME and LME prices. And that was obviously due to uncertainty and tariff threats where CME prices, meaning copper stored in the U.S. warehouse was trading about 30% higher than copper sitting in a European warehouse. That obviously is unwound since -- in the last few days as tariffs were not applied as broadly as considered. So that dislocation between the 2 markets is now unwound. That has obviously created a lot of uncertainty and a lot of stress for traders and end users.

With respect to the Copper Trust, yes, we acknowledge it is trading at a discount that we're clearly not happy with. It's approximately 20% discount, which is a real anomaly, an outlier relative to our other funds. One of the initiatives that is underway right now is that we have filed with the New York Stock Exchange an application to the SEC to duly list the vehicle. And part of the dual listing would envision a more robust and flexible redemption option. And that physical redemption and cash redemption option, if approved, would, in our opinion, in our experience, act as a very powerful incentive to close that discount to NAV. So we are obviously still in kind of a quiet period with the SEC but that is our best effort to address the product and help to tighten that discount. We have had an institution that has been under some stress that has been selling shares, that has also, I think, exacerbated the situation.

Thank you, John. And a question maybe for Kevin. On operating expenses, can you remind us what incremental margins Sprott could achieve given the rising net flows?

Sorry, I don't understand the question.

Well, so currently, you're generating about 60% adjusted EBITDA margins. How do you think about incremental margins as you raise more AUM?

Okay. Got you. Okay. Thanks for that. Well, I think one of the things that can help you or any analyst or investor looking at the story to get a sense of what's left as far as margin expansion opportunities. As the earnings base grows. And to the extent that, that growth is coming primarily from our Exchange Listed Products segment. What will just happen is you'll see a greater proportion of that business making up the consolidated results. And if you just look at the margins of that business, it's a little north of 80%. So in other words, as that business continues to grow and make up a bigger proportion of our overall consolidated results, you should see that 60% margin climbing higher.

In theory, if the Exchange Listed Products segment made up a significantly bigger portion of the overall business, then you would see the number getting closer to that 80% number there. But as Whitney's mentioned over the last few quarters, we do reinvest in the business to continue to achieve that growth. And so that will offset that climb a fair bit as well. So basically, if there was a high end, you're probably looking at somewhere a little closer to where the exchange listed business is right now, which is, I think it's Page 14 of the of the shareholders' report. And then the low end would be, to the extent the Managed Equities business became a bigger portion since that's the lower margin segment that we'd have.

I'd add to that, we would like to grow the lower-margin businesses because they carry higher fees on AUM. So we would trade off margin expansion for absolute net income growth for sure. But we've been blessed by having these physical trusts do very well. And it's certainly our hope that other divisions catch up at some point.

And then sorry to pile on with that, but that was another good point on Whitney's and that -- those businesses are also where all the carry and performance fees come from.

Our next question comes from Graham Ryding from TD Securities.

Maybe I could start on that carried interest performance fees. Can you just give us some color on like maybe what the contribution was in the quarter from I think there was one fund that you -- it was sort of in a wind up and then there was also some contribution from your active mining equity fund. Can you maybe give us some color on the mix?

Yes, sure. It's Kevin here, Graham. How is it going? So I'd say probably roughly about 65% -- 65% to 70% would have come from that legacy Exploration LP and the rest would have come from our resource exploration and development and active equity fund.

Okay. And then on that, it looked like the sort of the payout or the compensation payout was quite low relative to the, I think, $15 million in total carried interest and performance fees. Any reason why that was so low?

Yes. The -- so because it's from that -- the majority of it was from that Legacy LP, when we reimagined and restructured the business, and exited those areas, we were left at those exploration LPs that we're now harvesting for cash and in the process of closing down so the folks that would have otherwise had a bigger claim on that P&L are no longer here. So we're in the enviable position of retaining it for our shareholders. And that's pretty much the reason.

Yes. Okay. That makes sense. And then my last question on this theme is just can you give us any sort of color on sort of outlook maybe multiyear or next year, how you're thinking about the outlook for carried interest and performance fees because if I look historically, I think you're averaging about 3% of your net fees would come from carried interest and performance fees. But this quarter was obviously a big outlier. So it doesn't feel like we should be using this as a run rate. But can you give us any sort of color on what your expectations are?

Do you want me to take that, Kevin?

Yes, sure, Whitney.

So generating performance fees, carried interest in the second quarter have been unusual. We have one small fund. It's an exploration partners fund that crystallizes performance fees semiannually, but most of our funds in Managed Equities calculate them and get them at year-end. So that's kind of the timing of most of these come. And then, of course, there is a lending franchise, and those are long-term partnerships, and we earn those fees at the end of those partnerships. Lending Fund II will wind up sometime maybe late next year. And that's when those lumpy performance or carried interest would show up, but I think it'd be very hard. I certainly wouldn't try and model them in on a long-term basis.

Okay. Understood. And then my last question, if I could be a bit greedy here, just flows quarter-to-date. It looks like I'm estimating about $100 million or just north of $100 million. Does that sound right?

John, do you want to take that?

Yes. Graham, I don't have the number in front of me. I think it's fair to say that with heightened volatility in metals markets, which is what we've been experiencing, obviously, for the last 2 months, that does put us in a stronger position to issue new equity because of the requirement we need to achieve, which is issued above NAV. So that volatility, while markets and traders don't like it, it's actually positive for our business. And we have seen pretty consistent sales and it seems as though platinum carries the baton for a few weeks and then it goes to silver and then it goes to gold. And I think that's what's really helped our business is that we've had multiple metals kind of pulling the load and contributing here. So I think that's why we've had such good sales in the last 4 months or so.

And just remind me, Graham, you were saying what number did you say, Graham, you said $100 million, you have roughly?

Yes. For your exchange-listed products, I had just over $100 million a quarter like basically through July?

Yes. We're probably a little higher than that.

On the other hand, we have had redemptions in some of our ETFs, particularly the uranium ETFs. So that's a little bit of an offset that might bring you down a bit.

Yes. So with the offset that Whitney -- sorry. So I was just going to say, Graham, with the offsets Whitney talked about and what you're probably missing, you probably want to be a little closer to $150 million.

Okay. Sounds good.

Our next question comes from Mike Kozak from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Whitney, John, and Kevin, just 2 questions for me. First one, maybe just at a higher level. You kind of got and John, you alluded to it just now, but you have multiple metals, metals kind of firing on all cylinders, gold at all-time highs. Silver, I think, made a 14-year high a couple of weeks ago. And then you guys reported a very nice cash build in the second quarter, I believe, about $20 million in free cash flow in Q2. How do you think kind of the corporate level about the dividend policy? Would you ever consider a special dividend when you have multiple metals running like this?

We brought that up with a lot of our shareholders. Most of them don't like special dividends. I always thought that if particularly when we've got performance fees or carried interest or one-off kind of windfalls that might be a way to distribute to shareholders. But I think the current thinking is that we're going to continue to maintain a high payout on our earnings. And if things persist and continue to grow, certainly, you should expect the dividend to grow. We are coming into kind of a difficult period for markets in general. And so we remain committed to buying shares back opportunistically. And there are always a few items worth looking at in the acquisition area, but none significant, I would say, at this point.

Okay. And then my second question, and John, you kind of mentioned on the call, and I would agree with you that rightly or wrongly, the interest in the last couple of months has been elsewhere in the nuclear fuel cycle, specifically with the conversion enrichment, some of the SMR tech companies. My question is, would you consider an ETF that tracks that section of the fuel cycle, I certainly think it would be well received in current market conditions.

Mike, nice to check. Yes. Look, I mean, we're obviously very opportunistic and innovative at Sprott. I think our track record confirms that. And we're always looking for new ideas. We have strict criteria around what we will do and not do. ETFs are very crowded. So the last thing we want to do is to create another me-too product. But we do acknowledge that the interest in the space has shifted somewhat. Some of those stocks have gotten way ahead of themselves. So we have to be kind of mindful of what people are chasing. But yes, we're always open to different ideas, but we don't also want to stray out of our lane, which I think has been very helpful, and it allows us to really build on our core strengths and our competitive advantages.

Yes. If we can find a way to make something better that brings our mining expertise to bear, that's certainly something we'd look at. But again, we want to be focused on what we think we're best at, and that's in metals and mining.

[Operator Instructions] Okay. I'm showing no further questions at this time. This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Whitney George for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for participating in this call. We appreciate your interest in Sprott and look forward to speaking to you again after our third quarter results. Have a great day.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect.