Charles Bradley
Management
Thank you, Robert. In terms of looking at the market. As I mentioned, we haven't really seen any real change in the competition. They had a bunch of startups in the last year or 2, and they seem to be kind of moving along but not doing anything crazy.
As I mentioned, the large players have probably pulled back a little bit in terms of where they are buying, and so we haven't seen particularly any real strong competition from them either. And so with that, we've been able to sit where we sit, maintain our margins. I mean, we could probably grow faster, but we'd probably give up some of our pricing. And right now, we're certainly growing in a nice clip. There's no real reason to sacrifice the margins or grow too much faster. And because we're not growing superfast, we're able to really focus on keeping our metrics, our credit quality and keeping performance where it should be.
I think when the real benefits, as everybody now mentioned, is the strong asset-backed market. Because of that, I think it would be nice if everybody realized that a couple of years ago that the auto paper really performs well. People certainly realize that today. And as a result, the pricing continues to get better and better for us. And I think as long as we can keep growing and taking advantage of that market, really, the sky is the limit on how much better that can get. So that's a very strong thing for the future.
What we're really doing now is we're almost starting to plan for next year. One of the things we have realized is that it takes a little bit longer for our marketing folks to really get up to speed and get to the kind of production levels we would expect them to be at. And so we've already begun hiring a few more people -- a significant amount of people, so that we would be prepared for next year when sort of the growth phase kicks in, in that February, March and April timeframe.
With that, we continue to look for other acquisition potential candidates and things like that. Unfortunately, because of the strength of the asset market, and actually the auto market and I think, business portfolios in this market, the competition for those portfolio is rather extreme. So we're not -- we're certainly not going to stretch or anything, but if we find one, we would jump on it, as we have in the past.
With that, I think the quarter's going well. We expect the third quarter and the fourth quarter to sort of follow suit, and again, look for next year to probably be even better.
With that, we'll open it up for questions.