Greetings, and welcome to Rand Capital Corporation Third Quarter 2018 Financial Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host Deborah Pawlowski, Investor Relations for Rand. Thank you Ms. Pawlowski. You may begin.

Thanks, Doug, and good afternoon, everyone. We certainly appreciate your time today and your interest in Rand. On the line with are Pete Grum, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dan Penberthy, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Pete and Dan will be reviewing the results of the quarter that were released this morning. If you don’t have a copy of that release, it is available on our website at randcapital.com. The slides that will accompany our discussion today are also posted on the website. If you turn to that deck, on Slide 2, I’ll review our Safe Harbor statement. As you are likely aware, we may make some forward-looking statements during this presentation and also during the question-and-answer session. These statements apply to future events that are subject to risks and uncertainties as well as other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we state here today. These risks and uncertainties and other factors are provided in the earnings release, as well as, in other documents filed by the Company with Securities and Exchange Commission. These documents can be found either on our website or at sec.gov. So with that, let me turn it over to Pete who is going to summarize the highlights for the quarter as well as feature some of our portfolio of companies, and then Dan is going to follow up with more details regarding the financial. Pete?

Thanks, Dan. Good afternoon everyone. We’re happy to have this opportunity to update you on Rand’s third quarter. I’m going to start with Slide three. At the end of the quarter, our net asset value or as we call it NAV was $4.84 per share, down slightly from $4.87 at the end of Q2. Most of this decline was due to a realized loss, which we recorded on the sale of a portfolio of company that was slightly offset by an improved tax rate. The net result was the modest $0.03 decline on a per share basis. During the quarter, our investments have been modest. We’ve been working as you know to figure additional capital from the United States small business administration. That process continues. Accordingly, we only have one investment during the quarter. We invested $140,000 in the form of convertible secured note to one of our existing portfolio of companies, BeetNPath, the company that goes to market using the Grainful brand name. As you may recall, earlier this year, we announced that they unveiled product reformulization an updated brand look and feel and new packaging for their frozen entrée product line. This additional capital supports their ongoing market penetration and growth. Our initial investment in BeetNPath was in 2014. As you may know, our focus over the last couple of years is to invest in vehicles to build investment income, which has been evident in our investment income results over the past several quarters. In addition to that, we realized this quarter a non-recurring long restructuring interest income of a combine – those factors resulted into 66% increase in investment income over the prior quarter, a 34% percent increase for the nine month period. Dan will go over the financial results later in the discussion. If you turn…

Thanks Pete and good afternoon everyone. If you could please turn to Slide 14, I’ll start with the net asset value per share or NAV as Pete mentioned. We finished the quarter with a net asset value of $4.84. As you see on the chart NAV declined $0.03 per share over the trailing quarter. This decrease is attributable primarily to a realized loss upon the sale of a portfolio company, Intrinsiq Materials. That business had been underperforming and we did not realize any proceeds from the sale. We also benefited then from a favorable tax treatment rate for this quarter. Please turn to Slide 15. Here I summarize our operating performance for the third quarters of 2018 and 2017. Then also the first nine months of both years. I’ll take you through the key line items noted here. The first thing I want to point out is that our investment income line includes a nonrecurring item this quarter. The loans we had invested in Empire Genomics were modified this quarter and resulted in a recording of interest that had not been accrued, as well as a debt modification fee. Those items amounting to approximately $233,000 of investment income this quarter were then capitalized into the loan balance is part of this debt modification. That was a significant portion of a [indiscernible] that was in the investment income that was noted in the table. The remaining balance represents a healthy 8% increase over the prior year investment income. As we previously mentioned, we have been investing in more income producing instruments over the past couple of years and that has driven increased investment income. On a year-to-date basis, investment income is up $364,000 or 34%. Excluding the nonrecurring items in the quarter, which I had previously described, year-to-date investment income is…

Thank you, Dan. Before I open the line for questions, I want to say I hope you can see there’s lot of things going on excitement, a lot of underlying value on our portfolio company. We, as a management team are working hard to take the company to the next level by securing additional capital and driving our growth strategy. And now I’d like to open up for questions.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Brett Reiss with Janney Montgomery Scott. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, Pete, hi Dan, how are you doing?

Hi, Brett.

Your last comment that you’re looking at securing additional capital to go to the next level, can you give us some more specificity of the variety of things that you’re looking at in that area?

Hi, it’s the current thing as we’ve talked about our partnership with the SBA to obtain $6 million in additional leverage, it’s been very frustrating we’ve been working on this for some time. And as our last conversation with them, we’ve been told our application is in process and that’s what I was trying to refer to.

Okay. Are there any other things you’re looking at?

We’ve had discussions about issuing convertible, a variety of other capital market transactions. We have not found an underwriter that can accommodate that but do have some ongoing conversation.

If ultimately you go the BC route and get the $6 million additional capital, how will that help us when we look at the company a year or two down the road?

Well, the $6 million would be invested in no investment. And generally the rate between what we’re borrowing that because that’s agency data, that’s agency data compared to where we reinvestment is generally a positive. It’s really tenure – long-term capital for us to deploy.

Okay. So we capture the arbitrage spread. Okay. If you go to convertible route, how will that benefit us?

Well, it’s been a concept that has come from some shareholders, the way they talk to and it’s a way to just raise additional capital. It’s operational leverage and that as we grow our fixed expenses for running the company, say, fairly flat.

Can you do both or it’s got to be either or?

I believe we can do. I know we can do the SBA. So they may want to work with. The convertible note, I’m not sure these are discussions that we’ve had there’s a variety of ways to do that. And I’m not sure whether they would require shareholder vote or what really goes into it. But I believe out of consensual basis, we could do both.

Okay. Is there anything else other than these two avenue that can be on the table to try to get some more sponsorship of the stock and just a better stock price?

We are open to any and all ideas that may or may not know, but we have an investment banker that we work with from time to time. We get inquiries about various things and we have a fiduciary responsibility as a management and as a board to evaluate those, and we do evaluate.

Right. Right. All right, I’ll drop back in queue. Thank you for answering my question.

Thank you, Brett.

Our next question comes from the line of Brett Davidson, a private investor. Please proceed with your question.

Good afternoon. I got a quick question regarding the changes in the new tax law, regarding the qualified opportunity zones. Have you guys become familiar with that? And does that play any role in what brand maybe you’re looking to do?

We are aware of them and are trying to figure out how we can utilize these and whether they can be utilized and passed through the shareholders or how they work or whether it would really just pick up at a corporate level without taking proceeds and reinvesting them. As you know, the language on that legislation is being written kind of as we speak.

Yes, I believe they just came up with regs in the past – proposed regs in the past week or so. So guidance has come through on that and I haven’t got – had a chance to look at it, but I imagine it probably introduced is more confusion than it clears up, but…

But, yes, I think it’s sort of on the tax side.

Have you heard any rumblings from any of the SBA investment companies may be looking to open a new facility and explore and usually something like that?

I have not – I’ve had discussion with high net worth individuals and specifically around Buffalo as far as where the loans are going to be and how they may roll some of their investments into it.

Very good. Thank you.

Thanks, Brett.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions in the queue. I’d like to hand the call back to management for closing comments.

We appreciate you taking the time and learning more about RAND. In between these calls, if you want to pick up the phone and call us, we’re always available, and thank you very much for your time.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.