Vince Foster
Analyst · Robert W. Baird. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Jenny, and thank you all for joining us today. I will comment on the performance of our investment portfolio, discuss our recent dividend announcement and conclude by commenting on our investment pipeline. Following my comments, Dwayne Hyzak, our newly promoted President and Brent Smith, our CFO, will cover operating performance in more detail and comment on our third quarter financial results and originations, recent announcements, our current liquidity position and certain key portfolio statistics in our expense ratio, after which, they will take your questions. We were pleased with our operating performance during the third quarter in terms of earnings results. Our lower middle market investments are primary area of focus appreciated by $17 million on a net basis, with 18 of our investments appreciating during the quarter and 10 depreciating. Our middle market loans appreciated by roughly $16 million during the quarter on a net basis, and our private loans depreciated by $8.3 million during the quarter. Lastly, our investment in our External Investment Manager and our other investment assets depreciate by $700,000 on a net basis during the quarter. We finished the quarter with a net asset value per share of $21.79, a sequential decrease of $0.05 a share over the second quarter. We estimate that roughly $7.5 million of our middle market depreciation during the quarter was technical in nature rather than due to the company specific credit issues, the various leveraged loan indices experienced similar declines in valuation. Excluding this impact, our net asset value per share would have appreciated during the quarter by roughly $0.10. Our lower middle market companies with nearly $113 million of cash on their balance sheets collectively continue to exhibit highly conservative leverage ratios on a relative basis, which Dwayne will cover in greater detail. Earlier this week, our Board declared regular monthly dividends for the first quarter of $0.18 a share in each of January, February and March of 2016. The ex dates for these dividends are December 28th, January 20th, and February 18th, respectively. These dividends represent an increase of 6% over the monthly payout of $0.17 a share in the first quarter of last year. In addition, our Board declared a semiannual supplemental dividend last month payable in December of 27th a $0.005 a share. The ex date for this dividend is December 15th. This December will represent our fourth consecutive calendar year of special dividends, beginning with the 2012 dividend declared in the fourth quarter of that year. We continue to expect that we will pay supplemental dividends in addition to our regular monthly dividends as long as we are in a significant undistributed taxable income position. Also during the third quarter we reached an important milestone, excuse me, with our regular dividend paid on September 15th of -- this past September we had paid cumulative dividends in excess of our October 2007 IPO price of $15 a share. As of today, I characterized our investment pipeline is strong posturing us to exceed our combined lower middle market in private loan origination target of $250 million to $300 million for 2015. We continue to seek and receive significant equity participation in our lower middle market investments and as of quarter end, we owned an average of a 36% fully diluted equity ownership position in the 96% of these investments in which we currently have equity exposure. We have recently started to finance our new lower middle market in private loan investments with exit proceeds for our middle market portfolio. Our middle market portfolio was percentage of our total investment portfolio declined by about 1% in the third quarter relative to the second quarter and we expect that this trend will continue over the next few quarters. We used our middle market portfolio to help optimize our leveraged target in the past, but since we have now achieved our targeted leverage range, prudent rotation out of our middle market portfolio should accelerate. As of today, we have an unusually high number of existing lower middle market investments in various stages of discussions with potential acquirers, some have valuations materially in excess of our carrying values. And then they result a completed transactions, these discussions reinforce our view that markets are conservative on an overall basis. Our officer director group has continued to be regular purchasers of our shares investing approximately $600,000 during the third quarter. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Dwayne to cover our portfolio performance in more detail.