Art Penn
Analyst · West Family Investments
Yes, it's a great question, and something we think about all the time, and we were very public three or four years ago saying it's getting long in the tooth, which is why we've been generally moving up capital structure and you know, how we underwrite credit, I mean, we underwrite these days assuming there's going to be a recession next year, and we've been underwriting that for the last three years assuming there is a recession next year. So if you were to look at our credit memos, you'll see some nice downside cases, EBITDA down 10%, down 20%, down 30%, trying to handicap how these companies are going to perform, we look what happened in the last recession, we look at customer concentration, supplier concentration, the levers management compose, should there be weakness, whether it be working capital or CapEx. So, we're very aware and cognizant that there might be a recession down the corner. Again, we don't see any signs of it, but we underwrite it as if there will be, and turn it back to clock a time to 2007, then we were doing mostly subordinated mezzanine debt, and we did our original IPO in April of '07. By June of '07, we were starting to see some weakness in the underlying portfolio companies, and we made a conscience decision then to continue to invest, but only invest in companies and industries that we thought were recession-resistant only situations were we thought the leverage was very reasonable, where we could get good covenants and good yields. So, we raised the bar quite a bit, starting September of '07 proactively, and again, this was mostly secondly in the subordinated debt. And then it's interesting that vintage of deals that we did between, let's say, June of '07 and September of '08, performed very well, because we had proactively raised the bar, even though they were done before September of '08 when the financial world blew up, and even though there were subordinated debt in most cases we had proactively underwritten in a more cautious conservative fashion, which meant the EBITDA was down only about 7% on a blended basis of portfolio when the average, your company American EBITDA was down about 40%. So fast-forward to today, we are not seeing any weakness currently in the economy, and we'll be happy to share that with all of you in next quarter or the following quarter, whenever that is, but we are not seeing. That said, we are underwriting assuming there is a recession next year, and the vast majority of what we're doing is senior in the capital structure. So we think we are as well-positioned as we could be. At this point in time in the credit cycle and we still see some attractive risk adjusted returns, and as you could tell, right now we are okay giving up a little yield if we feel very good about the credit, and about the ability of the credit to perform well over time. So that's how we're thinking about it.