Theodore Koenig
Management
Hey, Tim good question. Probably the biggest question I get when I tour the world speaking to CIOs for LP funds. The market is competitive, by no structure the imagine is as an easy market to navigate, I think for private credit platforms. We have got an increased amount of competitors, there has been an increased amount of capital raise and because of the competitive pressures, if you look at all the staffs that LCD puts out, Standard and Poor's and any other agencies what we have seen is we have seen an increase in leverage from kind of the four, 4.5 turns to over five turns and the average LBL today in the middle market. Upper middle market is over six turns and pricing has come down in the last 18 months and documentation is worse, covenants are worse and EBITDA adjustments are worse. There is much more in a way of EBITDA adjustment. So, the general market I think is competitive and is difficult and we have been credit shop, we have been doing this for 15 years. So we have got some perspective on history as well as pre-crisis during crisis, post-crisis and you know in our business credit is really the driver of our business. We are fortunate that MRCC is part of an overall platform, very large platform. We have probably about 350 borrowers in our overall platform and my guess is probably a third of our deal flow comes from within our own platform, which is a significantly advantage that other platforms don't have. So we looked at about 2000 investment transactions last year and up the 2000 investment transactions we look at as a platform, we did about 75 of those. So about 3% of the overall look to book ratio is I call it or the amount of transactions that we look at, do we actually have the closing? No. I’m comfortable at 3% that everything is in place on our side from a credit standpoint, from an underwriting, from a portfolio review that we are doing the right things as good asset managers in protecting our capital and being good stewards for our shareholders. I can't comment on what other platforms are doing. I think that there are some platforms that have raised a lot of money in the last few years, particularly newer platforms that are trying to create scale and it is very hard I think to create scale in an environment where you have got bad loan documents, high leverage, relatively low pricing and EBITDA adjustments and bad definitions of EBITDA. So, I think if you look across the industry and I do this every once in a while, I was talking to my team yesterday, the consistent theme is that the platforms that tend to be affiliated, the BDC platforms tend to be affiliated with best-in-class larger scale managers and what I mean by that is we have got 20 origination sourcing professionals located throughout the U.S., looking at individual deals and creating a proprietary flow upon which we can invest in. And if you look across the Board the BDC platforms that have access to that type of origination capacity and sourcing tend to be the ones that perform the best and the platforms that tend to be sub scale or not affiliated with a best-in-class asset management firm, I think are the ones that are struggling. So for your first part of your question is on corporate, overall competitive environment. I think that answers that. The second part of the question, you talked about structure and credit and that is all about discipline and you know I will tell you the market has become much more undisciplined in the last two years, particularly the last 18 months, because of the amount of capital has been raised and some of the new arrangement in the space and we are not wavered. Our weighted average attachment points for leverage still remains around four turns and in an environment where companies are being bought and sold for 10 to 12 turns. So from a discipline standpoint, if anything going into this cycle, we are very, very conscious of what can happen, late this year, early next year, we have rotated out of some cyclical industries, we are avoiding some industries altogether. And we are really I think taking up the position of now making sure that our portfolio is defensible and that our net income is defensible and we are very focused on our dividend and making sure that we can be a consistent provider of stable cash flow to our shareholders. So hopefully that answers your question.