Rob Hamwee
Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities
Thank you, Steve. Before diving into the details of the quarter as always I’d like to give everyone a brief review of NMFC and our strategy. As outlined on Page 6 of our presentation, NMFC is externally managed by New Mountain Capital, a leading private equity firm. Since the inception of our debt investment program in 2008, we have taken New Mountain’s approach to private equity and applied it to corporate credit with a consistent focus on defensive growth business model and extensive fundamental research within industries that are already well known to New Mountain. Or more simply put, we invest in recession resistant businesses that we really know and that we really like. We believe this approach results in a differentiated and sustainable model that allows us to generate attractive risk adjusted rates of return across changing cycles and market conditions. To achieve our mandate, we utilized the existing New Mountain investment team as our primary underwriting resource. Turning to Page 7, you can see our total return performance from IPO in May 2011 through May 5, 2017. In the six years since our IPO, we have generated a compounded annual return to our initial public investors of 12.2%, meaningfully higher than our peers in the high yield index and well over 1000 basis points per annum above relevant risk free benchmarks. Page 8 goes into a little more detail around relative performance against our peers that benchmarking against the ten largest externally managed BDCs that have been public at least as long as we have. Page 9 shows return attribution. Total cumulative return continues to be largely driven by our cash dividend, which in turn has been more than 100% covered by NII. As the bar on the far right illustrates, over the six years we have been public, we have effectively maintained a stable book value, inclusive of special dividends, while generating 10.5% cash on cash return for our shareholders, fully supported by net investment income. We are very happy to be able to deliver this performance over a period of time where risk free rates have been effectively zero and will strive to continue this performance. We attribute our success to one, our differentiated underwriting platform, two, our ability to consistently generate the vast majority of our NII from stable cash interest income, three, our focus on running the business with an efficient balance sheet and always fully utilizing inexpensive appropriately structured leverage before accessing more expensive equity, and four, our alignment of shareholder and management interests. Our highest priority continues to be our focus on risk control and credit performance, which we believe over time, is the single biggest differentiator of total return in the BDC space. If you refer to page 10, we once again layout the cost basis of our investments, both the current portfolio and our cumulative investments since the inception of our credit business in 2008 and then show what is migrated down the performance ladder. Since inception, we have made investments of over $4.6 billion in 198 portfolio companies, of which only 7 representing just $112 million of cost have migrated to non-accrual and only 4, representing $42 million of costs have thus far resulted in realized default losses. This $42 million figure included our 27% realized loss in Transtar, which has now been fully incurred and the balance of the position monetized. Approximately 97% of our portfolio at fair market value is currently rated one or two on our internal scale. Page 11 shows leverage multiple for all of our holdings above $7.5 million when we entered an investment and leverage levels for the same investment as of the end of the most recent reporting period. While not a perfect metric, the asset by asset trend in leverage multiple is a good snapshot of credit performance and helps provide some degree of empirical fundamental support for our internal ratings and marks. As you can see by looking at the table, leverage multiples are roughly flat or trending in the right direction with only a few exceptions. Two loans that shown negative migration of 2.5 terms or more, one, which we have discussed for a number of quarter is Sierra Hamilton, where restructuring talks continue and underlying business trends are improving. The second is a high quality business that have save to certain end market challenges and where we expect financial metrics to approve – to improve in coming quarters. The company has significant cash flow and liquidity and should have no issue servicing its debt for the foreseeable future. The chart on Page 12 helps track the company’s overall economic performance since its IPO. At the top of the page, we show the regular quarterly dividend is being covered out of net investment income. As you can see, we continue to more than cover 100% of our cumulative regular dividend out of NII. On the bottom of the page, we focus on below the line items. First, we look at realized gains and realized credit and other losses. As you can see looking at the row highlighted in green, we’ve had success generating real economic gains every year through a combination of equity gains, portfolio company dividends and trading profits. Conversely, realized losses including default losses highlighted in orange have generally been smaller and less frequent and show that we are typically not avoiding non-accruals by selling poor credit at a material loss, prior to actual default. Despite our first significant realized loss since our IPO, we continue to have a net cumulative realized gain of $11 million highlighted in blue. Looking further down the page, we can see that cumulative net unrealized appreciation highlighted in grey stands at $22 million and cumulative net realized and unrealized loss highlighted in yellow is at $11 million, an improvement of $7 million from last quarter. I will now turn the call over to John Kline, NMFC’s President to discuss market conditions and portfolio activity. John?