WisdomTree, Inc. (NYSE:WT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeremy Schwartz: Thanks for that, Brennan. We are definitely seeing strong performance across the board. And last year was a very strong performance for all those international strategies you talked about. Europe, we’ve seen some interest in Japan this year. The U.S. investor base has interestingly pivoted to this view of a weak dollar. Now so much for the last 90 days was the dollar was rolling over as rates were dropping. Today, you have this big move back in the dollar because of a very strong employment report. So the currencies move around. We continue to talk about solutions for managing risk, whether it’s fully hedged solutions or dynamically hedged solutions. They’re smaller funds in the dynamics of the hedge space, but we did see some nice growth in those last year.

And so we continue to be well positioned for both sides of that trade, whether it’s a weaker dollar or a stronger dollar. We continue to have that opportunity. And what you’re seeing year-to-date is, if you look at the €“ just in January, our flows have actually been coming from some of the other funds that you probably talked about in the past, emerging markets, high dividends are leading. International high dividends are doing incredibly well this year to start the year. So we are talking a lot more about the valuation opportunities. I mentioned that in my first comments that we’re excited about high dividends globally. We see them as compelling opportunities for asset allocation, and we have a robust lineup, whether it’s hedged or not hedged.

Jarrett Lilien: And just adding that too on a sort of back to the future comment. If you went back to the sort of go-go years with hedge and DXJ, the company was much different. There were a much smaller number of funds, and we were much more concentrated. So I agree with you. There is a great opportunity in those funds. But what’s really exciting about now is the breadth and depth our product suite. And so it doesn’t have to be hedge and DXJ. If those run, that’s fantastic. But again, we have unbelievable performance across the products. We’re really well positioned for this market, and we have any number of funds that can take in flows. So it’s a much, much stronger story than it was back in those days.

Brennan Hawken: Sure. And thanks for humoring my bad joke. Switching to Prime, you’ve been beta testing for a while. What have been the big lessons learned from the beta testing process? And how has that informed your plans for the rollout?

Jonathan Steinberg: Will?

William Peck: Yes. I mean no, huge lessons learned. It’s really just a matter of making sure that our operations and processes are working right, whether that’s ACH onboarding, connectivity through PLAT, customer CIP, customer identification, customer service, things like that. It’s really just making sure that as we’ve designed it, it’s working as expected. And that when there inevitably comes up, things you need to tweak or fix that we’re able to do that in kind of a controlled beta testing environment. So in terms of the experience, I think it’s confirmed everything we hypothesize about it, and it’s really just a matter of us kind of making sure that we’re trying at all the operations and doing it with live money.

Brennan Hawken: Excellent. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is a follow-up from Michael Cyprys with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Michael Cyprys: Hey, thanks for taking the follow-up. Just on WisdomTree Prime, with the marketing strategy and approach this year, maybe you could expand upon what we can expect to see from WisdomTree with respect to marketing, advertising. How you think about the strategy there? It seems like that’s a meaningful component of the expense uplift. And then as you think about WisdomTree Prime looking out over the next 12 months, what does success look like for you?

Jonathan Steinberg: Again, Will, I think maybe you should take this.