Good morning and welcome to CION Investment Corporation’s Second Quarter Ended June 30, 2022 Earnings Conference Call. An earnings press release was distributed earlier this morning before market open. A copy of the release, along with the supplemental earnings presentation, is available on the company’s website at www.cionbdc.com in the Investor Resources section and should be reviewed in conjunction with the company’s Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. Please note that today’s conference call may contain forward-looking statements, which are not guarantees of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described in the company’s filings with the SEC. Speaking on today’s call will be Michael Reisner, CION Investment Corporation’s Co-Chief Executive Officer; Gregg Bresner, President and Chief Investment Officer; and Keith Franz, Chief Financial Officer. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Michael Reisner. Please go ahead, Mr. Reisner.

Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. As mentioned, I am joined today by Gregg and Keith as well as other members of senior management, including my Co-CEO, Mark Gatto. I will start our call today with an overview of second quarter results and our long-term strategy. Gregg will review our investment activity during the quarter, and Keith will provide additional detail on our financial results. After Keith’s remarks, we will open the call to questions. During the quarter, we continued to execute on our long-term business plan of growing our portfolio through a measured growth strategy as we seek to provide excellent risk-adjusted returns to our shareholders while remaining very disciplined in our credit selection. This strategy generated strong second quarter results despite the conservative use of our existing leverage capacity. As a result, we were able to announce an increase in distributions for the third quarter by $0.03 a share or over 10%, from $0.28 per share to $0.31 a share, which we believe represents a meaningful return to our shareholders. More specifically, over the quarter, we had strong capital deployment, and our portfolio continued to grow with quality deals. At June 30, the number of our portfolio companies increased to 121 from 115 across 22 industries. We had new investment commitments of $184 million, funded new investment commitments of $165 million, funded previously unfunded commitments of $8 million and had sales and repayments totaling $110 million. We funded 10 new portfolio companies and 9 existing portfolio companies, with 90% of such investment commitments to the new portfolio companies. Our increased total debt capacity has positioned us well to continue to grow our portfolio by pursuing a measured and disciplined strategy. Following shareholder approval to reduce…

Thank you, Michael, and hello, everyone. In describing the second quarter of 2022, I could not help but think of Charles Dickens’ opening sentence in his immortal novel, A Tale of Two Cities, as it was the best of times for some, and for others, the worst of times. There was a clear bifurcation between private and syndicated credit markets in Q2 as the strong liquidity and flexibility of private credit platforms helped to buoy their investment activities and deal pipelines versus the hard-hit syndicated markets. This was highly consistent with our experience, where we had a robust investment quarter with the largest and most compelling sourcing and investment pipeline that I have experienced in my more than 6 years at CION. This is in stark contrast to the syndicated loan and high-yield markets that were sharply impacted in Q2 by the plethora of economic and geopolitical challenges, including surging inflationary pressures, rising interest rates, the likelihood of recession, supply chain challenges and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The composite S&P/LSTA Leverage Loan Index declined 4.5% during Q2 and 4.6% for the year-to-date through June 30. Q2 institutional loan volume declined 50% from Q1 to $56 billion, the lowest quarterly issuance since the second quarter of 2020. Secondary loan pricing sank as low as 92.16% on June 30 and average loan yields rose 175 basis points to 7.55% for the quarter. The seemingly endless supply of cash inflows to prime loans reversed sharply with over $10 billion of outflows in May and June of 2022, offsetting a portion of the $28 billion raised from January to April. This dynamic continued in July with nearly another $6 billion of outflows. CION’s compounded total return to investors for the second quarter of 2022 and year-to-date 6/30/22 were 0.9% and 1.8% respectively. This…

Okay. Thank you, Gregg, and good morning, everyone. As Michael mentioned, we reported a solid second quarter results, driven by an increase in the size of our investment portfolio and additional fees generated from our quarterly investment activity. During the quarter, net investment income was $19.3 million or $0.34 per share, which is consistent with the first quarter. Total investment income during the quarter was $43.6 million compared to $41.7 million in the prior quarter. The increase in investment income was primarily driven by additional fees generated from our investment activity. On the expense side, total expenses were $24.3 million for the quarter compared to $22.2 million in Q1. The increase was primarily due to higher interest expense related to higher LIBOR and SOFR rates as well as an increase in the average debt outstanding during the quarter. At June 30, we had total assets of $1.9 billion and total equity or net assets of $905 million with total debt outstanding at $948 million and 56.9 million shares outstanding. As a result, at the end of the quarter, our debt-to-equity ratio was 1.05x as compared to 0.95x at the end of Q1 and 0.89x at year-end, which reflects the measured growth of our portfolio through the use of additional leverage. As of June 30, our NAV was $15.89 per share compared to $16.20 per share at March 31. The decrease in the NAV of $0.31 per share or about 1.9% was driven primarily by mark-to-market adjustments caused by wider credit spreads and price declines in our portfolio. As we have previously announced, we received shareholder approval to reduce our asset coverage ratio from 200% to 150% back in December of 2021. Since that time, we took steps to increase our total debt capacity by $150 million. We upsized our senior…

Thanks, Keith. As a final thought before we open the line for questions, we’d like to reiterate our message that we firmly believe CION is well positioned to provide higher returns to its shareholders. We are very optimistic about future prospects for CION despite the concerns we discussed regarding current market conditions. We believe that our relatively conservative investment strategy has served investors well. The value proposition of our platform should become increasingly evident over time as we do have the flexibility to weather any potential headwinds as well as to consider measured growth. So with that, operator, we’re ready to take any questions.

Our first question today is coming from Finian O’Shea from Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is now live. Finian O’Shea: Hi, good morning. Thank you. First, small question, I appreciate the color on the non-accruals. The first, you mentioned, I think, STATinMED, sorry if I have that wrong, with a post-quarter equity restructuring. Is – question is, is there any change to your security? Or will we see the investment we see in the 6/30 schedule of investments resume paying?

Yes. So Finian, so you’ll see a slightly different mix of securities, but you will see a debt security that’s paying cash and a preferred equity security with a common equity participation attached to it. Finian O’Shea: Okay, thank you. That’s helpful.

Yes, and that became effective as of July 1. Finian O’Shea: Okay. And a question, I think, Gregg, you mentioned there was progress in a handful of new sourcing partners. Seeing if you could expand on sort of the – how you achieved that? What it means? I’m sure more deal flow. But are there any size or sector concentrations that might produce some style drift in the portfolio for you? And then maybe as a second part there, should we expect to see, say, a lot more of this or are you happy with your sort of ecosystem today?

So in terms of strategy shift, there won’t be any. We’re continuing. There is no particular sector shift or anything. We’re continuing to do business as we have been. So there is really no style drift. I would say, on the new partners, it’s just really the compounding nature of our platform and our relationships. We continue to build new relationships every day. And in this particular case for the quarter, these new club partners were introduced through us, through other deals and through other partners we had done transactions with the past. So it’s just really a function of us being out there and continuing to do more direct business. Finian O’Shea: Awesome. Helpful. And if I can do a third bonus question. Can you – and forgive me if I missed this. Can you provide the buyback? I don’t know if you will offer that detail for post quarter or if that’s able to start just today, but any sort of state of affairs you can provide on buying back stock under your program? Thank you.

Yes, Mike – and it’s Michael. As of now, we intend to start execution of the buyback next week. And again, depending on where the stock is trading, we continue take it daily. Finian O’Shea: Appreciate that. Thanks so much.

Thank you. We reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I’d like to turn the floor back over for any further or closing comments.

Thank you, everyone who joined the call today. We do appreciate your interest in CION. We look forward to speaking to you next quarter. Enjoy the rest of the summer.

Thank you. That does conclude today’s teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.