Good day and welcome to the TICC Capital Corp. First Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jonathan Cohen, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome everyone to the TICC Capital Corp. first quarter 2017 earnings conference call. I'm joined today by Saul Rosenthal, our President and Chief Operating Officer; and Bruce Rubin, our Chief Financial Officer. Bruce, could you open the call today with a discussion regarding forward-looking statements?

Sure, Jonathan. Today's call is being recorded. An audio replay of the conference call will be available for 30 days. The replay information is included in our press release that was released earlier this morning. Please note that this call is the property of TICC Capital Corp. Any unauthorized rebroadcast of this call in any form is strictly prohibited. I would also like to call your attention to the customary disclosure in our press release this morning regarding forward-looking information. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements and projections, and we ask that you refer to our most recent filings at the SEC, for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these projections. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements, unless required to do so by law. To obtain copies of our latest SEC filings, please visit our website at www.ticc.com. With that, I'll turn the presentation back over to Jonathan.

Bruce, thanks very much. We generated a total return of approximately 3% during the first quarter of 2017 representing the increase in TICC’s book value per share plus distributions paid to our common shareholders. Our book value per share rose from $7.50 at the end of the December 2016 quarter to $7.53 at March 31 and we paid distributions of $0.20 per share during the first quarter. For the quarter ended March 31, 2017, we recorded GAAP net investment income of approximately $7.9 million or approximately $0.15 per share. In the first quarter, we also recorded net unrealized appreciation of approximately $9.6 million, and net realized capital losses of approximately $5.5 million. In total, we had a net increase in net assets from operations of approximately $12.1 million or $0.23 per share. Our core net investment income for the quarter ended March 31 was approximately $10.4 million or approximately $0.20 per share. Please see the earnings release we issued today for a reconciliation of net investment income with core net investment income. Following the company’s strong total return performance for the full year 2016 and with the continuation of strength in the corporate loan market during the first quarter of calendar 2017, we believe that various initiatives including the share repurchase program we completed in 2016 and the portfolio rotation strategy we continue to implement contributed to the total return we generated in the first quarter. We note that we continue to have no investments on non-accrual status as of March 31, 2017. From January 01, 2017 to March 31, the LSTA Corporate Loan Index rose from 98.08% to 98.22% during the first quarter of 2017; tighter leverage loan spreads continue to generally reduce the weighted average spread of the loan assets within our CLO investments. That reduction in credit…

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Mickey Schleien from Ladenburg. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Jonathan.

Good morning, Mickey.

Jonathan, since we don’t have the Q yet, we haven’t seen the portfolio obviously, can you provide us some more background on how the non-CLO investments break down between the broadly syndicated bucket, narrowly syndicated bucket and the club deals?

Sure, Mickey. The portfolio obviously will be coming out with the Q that should be a little bit later today. But essentially what you would have seen in the first quarter is a continued rotation out of the more broadly syndicated corporate loans into again more narrowly syndicated more privately negotiated second lien transactions and a continued rotation on that basis. We don’t have a precise breakdown and I’m not sure that we actually categorize loans according to their syndicated or non-syndicated privately negotiated versus club deal status as those elements really represent points on a continuum as opposed to black and white lines of demarcation. So we don’t have any sort of a statistical breakdown but certainly what you’ll see when our scheduled investments is released again later today is a continuation of that rotation.

The next question comes from Christopher Testa from National Securities Corporation. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Jonathan, just touching a bit on Mickey’s question, just wondering if you could give us kind of a differential and the characteristics between the club deals versus broadly syndicated just in terms of average borrower size and attachment point leverage?

Sure. I think what we continue to see Chris is our smaller deals characterized by a fewer number of participants certainly, smaller tranche sizes especially with respect to the second lien and these are deals that as you know are principally, privately negotiated. These are not subject to a broader syndication process. We are strongly biased right now in deals where we are getting an early look or a first look in some cases directly from the sponsor, we hope and expect that to continue.

Okay, great. And do you have an indication of how much of the club deals you were the lead arranger on?

No. We don’t have that information at the moment, Chris.

Our next question comes from Mickey Schleien from Ladenburg. Please go ahead.

Yes, Jonathan, I was cut off. Just a follow-up on my previous question, then one more question. Can you give us a sense broadly speaking of what the spread is that you are earning when you invest in a club deal versus syndicated deals?

I mean typically, Mickey, what we’re seeing in terms of second lien narrowly syndicated or privately negotiated deal somewhere in the high single digits for transactions where we are comfortable with the total level of leverage with the recurring nature of the underlying cash flows with the persistency of the margin structures and with all of the other aspects that we focus on in the context of our underwriting. I would say second lien syndicated right now is probably LIBOR plus 800 to 900 basis points whereas privately negotiated second liens with broadly similar credit structures we’re looking at somewhere around a 100 basis points wider. So call it, LIBOR plus 900 to 1000.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Jonathan Cohen for closing remarks.

I’d like to thank everyone for their continued interest in TICC. We look forward to speaking to you in the future and thank you very much for your attention this morning.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.