Greetings. And welcome to the CION Investment Corporation’s Third Quarter 2024 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce you to your host, Charlie Arestia, Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations. Thank you, Charlie. You may begin.

Good morning. And welcome to CION Investment Corporation’s third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. An earnings press release was distributed earlier this morning before market opened. A copy of the release along with a 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. Joining me on today’s call will be Mark Gatto, 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 like to now turn the call over to Mark Gatto. Please go ahead, Mark.

Thank you, Charlie. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. I am pleased with CION’s quarterly results as we continue to navigate a highly competitive credit environment with persistent uncertainty in the broader capital markets. The Fed’s rate cut during the quarter, the first such move in four years, represented the first steps towards a potentially more normalized inflation and lower interest rate environment. However, we continue to maintain a conservative and prudent outlook as we have for the past several quarters heading into the end of the calendar year. As Keith will discuss later on the call, we were very active in managing the right-size of our balance sheet in the third quarter, which resulted in unsecured debt making up the majority of our overall debt funding mix for the first time. These transactions have given us a more flexible balance sheet that we believe is better positioned to withstand any potential volatility in the capital markets heading into next year without meaningfully increasing our cost of capital. We were also pleased with the execution of our public baby bond offering, which was more than 3 times oversubscribed and saw strong interest from both existing and new institutional investors, as well as a strong showing from retail investors. Our offering is the largest standalone baby bond in the publicly listed BDC space today. This is a significant step in the evolution of CION as a public company and we were thrilled to see the strong investor support. Moving now to our quarterly results, CION reported $0.40 in quarterly net investment income for the third quarter, driven primarily by a mix of interest income from our portfolio, as well as transaction fees from our quarterly investment activity, more than covering our $.36 base quarterly dividend. Our net…

Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. Our Q3 net investment income benefited from a diverse combination of coupon income, transaction fees and yield-enhancing provisions such as MOICs and prepayment premiums. We remain highly selective with new investments as we were effectively at full investment during most of the quarter as we successfully achieved our targeted leverage level of 1.25 times. In addition, we have been passing on a historically higher percentage of potential investments based on credit and pricing considerations. As Mark discussed in his remarks, market conditions remain competitive as capital inflows continue to chase transactions, resulting in lower coupon spreads, higher leverage attachment levels and easing credit terms throughout the leverage loan markets. We continue to strategically focus on first-line investing at the top of the capital structure and prefer to utilize secured yield-enhancing provisions such as PIK features, call protection, make whole provisions and MOICs to incrementally enhance yields at the top of the capital structure rather than reaching deeper into capital structures for mezzanine and equity co-investments. We believe our continued investment selectivity and proportional deployment levels relative to our fund size helped us to invest in first-line loans at higher spreads when compared to the overall loan markets during the quarter. The weighted average coupon for our total funded first-line debt investments for the quarter was the equivalent of SOFR plus 6%. We also continued our highly selective focus on secondary investments where we see attractive risk-return profiles or the opportunity to acquire lightly syndicated first-line loan tranches at significant discounts to par due to technical reasons where we expect to have active roles in the processes that drive the refinancing or restructuring of the investments. Historically, we’ve been able to realize healthy recoveries on our first-line restructured reorganized transactions as our realized weighted…

Okay. Thank you, Gregg, and good morning, everyone. As Mark mentioned, we reported another quarter of solid financial results driven by a combination of income generated from a quarterly investment activity, including amendment and other transaction fees realized during the period. During the quarter, net investment income was $21.6 million or $0.40 per share, compared to $22.9 million or $0.43 per share, reported in the second quarter, a decrease of $1.3 million or $0.03 per share. Total investment income was $59.6 million during Q3, as compared to $61.4 million reported in Q2. The decrease of $1.8 million was driven by lower dividend income recorded during the period, which was slightly offset by higher transaction fees compared to the second quarter. On the expense side, total operating expenses were $38 million, as compared to $38.4 million reported in the second quarter. The decrease was primarily driven by lower advisory fees and interest expense 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 $839 million, with total debt outstanding of $1.07 billion and 53.4 million shares outstanding. At the end of the quarter, our net debt-to-equity ratio was 1.18 times, which is slightly higher than 1.13 times at the end of Q2. Our portfolio fair value ended the quarter at $1.75 billion, down $70 million from the second quarter, reflecting an increase in repayment activity received at the end of the quarter. The weighted average yield on our debt and other income-producing investments at amortized costs was 12.2% at September 30th, which is down from 12.8% or about 60 basis points from the second quarter. At September 30th, our NAV was $15.73 per share, as compared to $16.08 per share at the end of June. The decrease…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] All right, there are no questions at this time. I would like to pass the call back over to Mark for closing remarks. : :

Thank you. In closing, we had a strong quarter led by our repositioning of our balance sheet to increase our financial flexibility and took a major step forward as a public company with a highly successful baby bond offering. Heading into the end of the fiscal year, we believe CION is well positioned to navigate market volatility and deploy into opportunities that fit our investment profile. We are pleased with our very strong performance this year, as CION’s total return over the last 12 months remains in the upper echelon of all public BDCs. However, we will remain diligent in educating a broad audience of investors on the ability of our differentiated platform to generate very attractive risk-adjusted returns in a variety of market environments. Thank you all for your continued support of CION and we look forward to speaking again next quarter.

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