Good morning. And welcome to CION Investment Corporation’s Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. An earning press release was distributed earlier this morning before market opened. A copy of the release, along with the supplement 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. And with that, I would now like to turn the call over to Michael Reisner. Thank you. Please go ahead, Michael.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. 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 our third quarter results, Gregg will review our investment activity during the quarter and Keith will provide additional detail on our financial results. After Keith’s prepared remarks, we will open the call to questions. As we reported this morning, we had a very strong third quarter, which saw a continued resilient credit profile, an over 3% increase to our net asset value quarter-over-quarter and strong net income of $0.87 per share, an increase of 70.6% quarter-over-quarter and 45% year-over-year. Our net investment income of $0.55 per share continues to outperform our dividend. As we did last year, we expect to be in a position to declare a year-end special dividend, while keeping our base dividend steady for now. The special dividend would be in addition to the two supplemental dividends previously announced. We previously declared a supplemental dividend of $0.05 per share for both the third and fourth quarters. Our net investment income of $0.55 per share is up 22% year-over-year and 27.9%, sequentially, driven on balance by higher interest income from our floating rate loan assets, origination and other transaction fees, prepayment and other yield enhancing features within the portfolio, and the reversal of non-accruals from restructured transactions. Our portfolio delivered resilient credit performance, as a percentage of our portfolio on non-accrual fell to 1.03% of fair value, down from 1.69% the previous quarter. Perhaps an even better indication of our credit performance, the percentage of names that we have risk-rated four or five has remained consistent at around 1% of the portfolio, which compares…

Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. Our Q3 net investment income benefited from a diverse combination of the direct pass-through of higher floating interest rates from our loan assets, origination and amendment fees, prepayment premiums and other yield enhancing provisions embedded with our primarily first lien portfolio. There remains a clear distinction between the large cap syndicated markets and the direct private credit market where we strategically focus. The private direct lending sector remains robust, which is consistent with what we are experiencing with our platform as our private direct transaction sourcing remains strong. We are seeing many direct investment opportunities for which we remain highly selective. We have seen an increase in refinancing opportunities, particularly in conjunction with tack-on acquisitions or additional debt capital as required what is beyond the capacity of the incumbent lender groups. In addition, we have benefited from technically-driven disruptions in the syndicated loan market, where we continue to acquire lightly syndicated first-lien loan tranches at substantial discounts to par due to issues such as ratings changes, maturity extensions, exchanges or restructurings, which are not suitable for the existing syndicate holders. We remain highly selective with new investments, as we are still cautious with respect to the U.S. consumer, particularly in light of recent global developments. M&A activity remains relatively subdued, and we have seen a number of circumstances where valuation gaps and lengthy negotiations are not ultimately being converted into closed transactions. These dynamics have resulted in several of our planned investment closing slipping from Q3 to Q4. Turning now to our Q3 investment and portfolio activity. During Q3, we continued our focus on higher yielding first-lien opportunities in both the directly sourced and lightly syndicated loan markets. Our focus on the lightly syndicated markets remains targeted on higher yielding illiquid opportunities, such…

Okay. Thank you, Gregg, and good morning, everyone. As Michael mentioned, we reported another quarter of solid investment performance, driven by an increase in LIBOR and SOFR rates, fees generated from our quarterly investment activity, prepayment premiums and other yield enhancing features within our portfolio. During the quarter, net investment income was $30 million or $0.55 per share, as compared to $23.4 million or $0.43 per share reported in the second quarter, an increase of $6.6 million or $0.12 per share. Total investment income was $67.5 million during Q3, as compared to $58.5 million reported during the second quarter, an increase of $9 million or 15%. On the expense side, total operating expenses were $38 million, compared to $35 million in the second quarter. Total operating expenses reflect an increase in interest expense due to higher LIBOR and SOFR rates, as well as higher advisory fees when compared to the prior quarter. At September 30th, we had total assets of approximately $1.9 billion and total equity or net assets of $861 million, with total debt outstanding of $1 billion and 54.5 million shares outstanding. At the end of the quarter, our net debt-to-equity ratio was 1.03 times, which is slightly lower than our net debt-to-equity ratio of 1.04 times at the end of Q2. At September 30th, our NAV was $15.80 per share, as compared to $15.31 per share at June 30th. The increase of $0.49 per share or an increase of 3.2% was primarily due to overearning our distribution, price increases in the portfolio and the accretive nature of our share repurchase program during the quarter. We ended the quarter with a strong and flexible balance sheet, with over $500 million in unencumbered assets, lower net leverage relative to our peers, a strong debt servicing capacity and solid liquidity.…

Thanks, Keith. As a final thought before we open the line, we would like to reiterate our message that we believe CION is well positioned to provide solid returns to its shareholders despite current market conditions. And with that, Operator, we are ready to take any questions.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the line of Erik Zwick with Hovde Group. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning, everyone. I wanted to first start on leverage and you mentioned kind of a target range or kind of a target level of 1.25%. In the past year or so, you have been around 1% or so. So just curious about, if you need to see a change in market opportunities, comfort with the economy, that outlook or how you would think about kind of approaching that target range and over what timeframe?

Yeah. Thanks, Erik. It’s Michael. So as we have always said, we want to get to 1.25 times. We are just cautious in how we obtain the additional leverage. We wanted to be cognizant of not only rates in the environment, but also the mix between secured and unsecured and we were happy that we are able to get this $100 million in unsecured and also floating. That was important to us to match the liabilities and assets, especially where rates are at this time.

Got it. Thanks for the color there. And another one, just as I kind of look through the statistics that you provided in the portfolio companies. I noticed that the current median EBITDA at $33.7 million is down about 10% from the year ago figure. But I also do see that the footnote indicates that those median figures are as of EBITDA at the initial investment period. So curious, one, if the year-over-year decline is reflective of you may be kind of targeting some smaller companies and I know in your prepared comments, you said kind of going deeper into smaller middle-market companies. And if that is the case, curious if you could provide any kind of color or commentary over what the average year-over-year growth in actual EBITDA for your portfolio companies has been?

Yeah. So, Erik, this is Gregg. I think there are two issues. One, the median EBITDA number is more a reflection of portfolio in and out than it is any earnings profile. From an organic earnings point of view, our EBITDA is up. We are seeing single-digit EBITDA growth in names that we have held over a quarter. So what you are seeing in that movement really is a reflection of names coming in, names coming out. This quarter, we did a couple of new platforms that had about $17 million of EBITDA, so that brought the number down a bit and we exited something that had over $100 million of EBITDA. So it’s more pure math than it is any earnings or a strategic decision.

That make sense. I appreciate the color there. That’s all I had today. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Erik.

And at this time, there are no further questions and I’d like to turn it back over to management for any closing comments.

Great. Well, thank you everyone who joined the call today. We appreciate your interest and we look forward to speaking to you in early March when we announce our fourth quarter and year end results. Thank you, everyone.

This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.