AGM 2021

Oct 8, 2021

Good morning officially. I'm Howard Brescher, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Val U Line, and welcome to the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Shareholders. This meeting is called to order at this time. It's October 2021. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our annual meeting. As in the past, what we do is go through the official business first, then I'll give a brief update on developments at the company for the annual meeting, and we'll be happy to take questions at that time. We accepted questions in advance by email, as you may know. And we should also be able to accept them both verbally or by the The purpose of this meeting is set forth by the Board to serve as proxies will serve as with us are Terry Bernstein and the Chief Financial Officers, our Directors and several of our shareholders seeking for pending. The purpose of the meeting is set forth in the formal notice of meeting, which you have received. Stephen Anastasio, our Vice President and Treasurer, will be the secretary of this meeting. And if the audio is working correctly, Mr. Anastasio will present attendance in the assistance of ASP during the process. Steven? We do have a follow on. The notice of the meeting dated August 17, 2021, the 74th of time based on purpose of the meeting. Complete this, which are at the testing of the Inspector of Elections of the holders of common stock of the company as of the close of business on August 12, 2021, the record date is hit by the Board of Directors for shareholders entitled to notice of and to vote this week, which shows that 9,500 and 57,761 shares of common stock has been outstanding and entitled for vote at this meeting. An affidavit of Dominic Bacter, employee of American Stock Transfer and Trust Company LLC, the company's transfer agent, showing that on August 18, 2021, Atomic Bachus caused to be mailed a notice of Internet availability of proxy materials, including the annual report, notice of meeting, proxy statement, former proxy and proxy cards to each shareholder of record on the record date. Thanks, mister Anastasio. And a copy of the printed notice and affidavit of mail will be paid for the company. Now, at this time pursuant to the authority vested by statute. I appoint Tamara to just say, the inspectors have erection. The inspection was executing the local office, which will also be filed in the records of the company. I asked that the inspectors take the call with the staff representative at the meeting, talk to you in person and present to them. And Stacy, is there anyone of heavy who wishes to present a proxy in Pensacola personally and indicated to shareholders that proxy is the meeting, but has anyone thought that proxy has voted first? Not to my knowledge at this point. The items have indicated to me that the present person of my proxy at this meeting. The holders of record as of the record date closed with this is August 12, 2021. There are present First business is the election of directors for the end of the year. Calling person, as you know, at the time, he's the director of the SEC filings. Howard Drescher, Steve Anastasia, Mary Bernstein, Alfred Fiori, Steven Davis and Glenn Munzer. I'm going to entertain a motion that termination be closed. Is there a special motion? I'll make the motion to close nomination. I'll second it now Fiore. Thanks, Mr. Fiore. The shareholders who have sent in their proxy forms will all representing majority of the outstanding shares of the company and were therefore affected. In favor of adjourning the meeting? Thank you, Steve. And the meeting is, therefore, adjourned. As I said, next, I will speak about some of the highlights and developments of the year year. Our dividend yield to the shareholders far exceeded the stock market average and part of that was that your Board of Directors enacted the 7th consecutive annual increase in the 7th consecutive annual the highest over the past 10 years coming in at $2.43 per share. On the circulation front for our publishing operations, we've teased that overall circulation of 2 digits together has increased year over year. As of year end, the overall total was up 5.9% in fiscal 2020. We have worked hard and succeeded in increasing the average dollar amount that we've obtained from our individual investment customers by promoting 2 years of strategic terms and also various combination offers such print and digital service. Going on the company's overall digital service revenue, as you may know, now consistently exceeds our print revenue. This is an opportunity for our shareholders, for our subscribers rather to receive information more promptly and conveniently and also helps us manage our cost of delivery. Traditions in other parts of our business continue to perform well too. In terms of asset management, our mutual fund manager and our stock derived business, which involves our Valyulin index and being used in other financial products. The biggest uptrend actually in fiscal 2021 was in revenue payments and our share profits from U. S. Asset Management, sometimes called EAN. UAB, the company we separated out in 2010, take on the role of advisor and distributor of the Val U Line family of mutual funds. The total of Val U Line that is received from the GAM operations was $17,300,000 up by nearly $5,000,000 from the year before. After the significant bump in the road of the coronavirus in our market, which principally occurred towards the beginning of the pandemic and then followed by our market. Market recovery despite the continuing effects on the economy of the virus situation. NewWeb Asset Management continues both to attract new investment monies, new investments to the key underlying equity funds that it operates. And they've grown the assets by also by appropriate stock collection, keeping up with or exceeding the strong recovery that stock market generally explains. Copyright revenue was stable this year. Investment income that we realized increased Dividend income trended up and we enjoyed realized investment income totaling about $2,000,000 this year, consisting mostly of capital gains that we achieved. On the financial side, the company remains strong, giving us the flexibility to continue and to expand in good times and wet split times. For example, on the financial side, retained earnings grew during the year by more than $15,100,000 Current assets were up more than 25% as our liquidity is covered. And very importantly, some $16,000,000 in dividends have been paid to our shareholders over the past 2 years. In addition, shareholders have also benefited from repurchases of shares by the company as those shares have increased in value from the prices at which they were purchased. When we purchased shares under supervision of the Board of Directors, we believe they're a good investment and in respect to their going up in price, we have been impacting the investment value of the shares. We constantly add important stocks of interest to our coverage. We keep track of both the hottest stocks and also stocks that may get less attention but are also according to our leaders and we're actually adding stocks to the list of those that we cover. We believe that we cover in fact a lot, We have a much bigger share of the stocks on the stock exchange than almost any of the broker's houses or other research houses. So for examples, we've added hot initial public offerings like Beyond Meat, the legal tender company and Uber, the ride sharing taxi service. And also we keep track of split ups and combinations among some of the old industrial stalwarts. So we've had the old Dow Chemical, we have new Dow Chemical. When one of the large conglomerates split up, we began to cover carrier air conditioning, Otis Elevators and Raytheon Technologies, the 3 parts of the company that were created and we guided to these at all times for our readers on these important developments. The second area that we're very pleased with is that our new M and A, that's mergers and acquisitions, publication has been one of our fastest growing product introductions ever. That's come, I think, on the strength of an immediate strong record of recommending winning products. Next, many investors and subscribers may appreciate our climate change investing service. We emphasize the investing part because our climate change, our global warming publication is an answer to our readers understanding issues and making money. Therefore, our Climate Change and Testing Service focuses on businesses that provide solutions to global warming or that are likely to thrive in the circumstances of our changing clients. So, we cover alternative energy and solar energy companies that are part of the solution. We also from time to time have covered companies that make generators, which are necessary in these terrible hurricanes that we sometimes have. We'll cover companies that help to secure and strengthen ports and areas for resilience. So that both categories and areas of business have covered the investing service requirement. And then finally, sort of looking inward, we have modernized and continue to modernize our security and cyber security provisions for our digital services and for our own operations. And we're also increasing both the convenience, speed, abilities and user friendliness of both our internal computer systems and our customer facing computer systems. This is always a gradual process, but I think that our digital users have appreciated last night and we have a top of this constantly. Well, those are the comments that I wanted to make. You can read more in the annual quarterly reports. I know many of you follow with interest. And if the technology permits, we'll be very happy now to take questions, whether it's by chat or just call ahead and speak up. I'll be quiet for a moment. Sometimes we have a number of questions and other times not so many. Hearing none so far, I think that we have set it up and we appreciate your interest, attendance, your votes and your support, which we drive very hard to earn. So, thank you for coming to the Value Line in 2021 Annual Meeting. Technically, it's been adjourned already. And now, we will shut down