Christopher Bogart: I think that, that is right. Although Jordan, can you check the amount?
Jordan Licht: Yes, that’s correct. Not — give or take. I mean, yes, it’s around that.
Julian Roberts: Yes, sorry, my point being that actually, that means that even in Q4 with a pretty big realization, you still had quite diverse sources of realized gains. Sorry, that’s all I had actually. Thank you very much.
Christopher Bogart: Well, thank you very much, Julian.
Jonathan Molot: I would just say that is consistent with, as Chris said, the number of trials going on at any given time. There’s just a lot going on in the portfolio. And as Chris also said, some number of them may settle on the courthouse steps and some number will go through and then companies will take a time to pay through the appellate process often. And so it makes sense that the money is coming from diverse sources.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Alex Bowers from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Alexander Bowers: Hi, everyone. Just three questions from me, if I may. Just firstly, can we get sort of a latest update on the sort of COVID-related case backlog and sort of how much further you believe there is to go on that? And sort of more specifically to Burford, what your sort of outlook is for ’24 in terms of cases that are sort of nearing completion? So the first one. Second one is, I think you mentioned in the presentation that sort of transaction size has doubled since 2019. How do you think about sort of mix or diversification of the portfolio between sort of larger and smaller cases? And then just sort of lastly on YPF. I think you saw a small markup in Q4 get sort of the understanding of what drove that? Is that sort of primarily the sort of post-judgment interest accruing on that?
And then sort of secondly on YPF, sorry, I guess it makes me four questions. But in terms of the appeal, I think, we’ve seen Argentina’s opening briefing come out. Was there anything in there that sort of surprised you? Thanks.
Christopher Bogart: So we’re going to split these up. And Jon will take the last two, the two YPF-related questions. I’ll do the COVID backlog and Jordan can speak to diversification. In terms of the COVID backlog, I think that where you really — if you look back at Slide 14, that slide is really there to try to illustrate the backlog in the portfolio. And as I said at the outset of the presentation, you would — all things being equal, without COVID, you would expect the middle of that slide to be further along towards realization of this. Now we’ve made big strides this year, but we’ve still got more to do in terms of clearing that backlog. And that’s why we said that we expected a continued — I forget the language we use, but a continued robust level of activity in 2024 as yet more of those cases move through the litigation process.
We’ve got — as we had last year, we’ve got a significantly larger number of trials scheduled, for example, in 2024 than we did in, let’s say, 2022. So I think that’s sort of where we’re headed for clearing the COVID backlog. And then before I turn it over to Jordan, the numbers there, just my sort of macro comment about diversification is that yes, we’ve got increases in transaction size. But of course, we’ve also got increases in total business volume and portfolio side. So in some ways, the business is as diversified as it’s ever been in terms of the relative share of the portfolio that any single thing represents when we were much smaller, we had a world where we were actually somewhat less diversified because we simply didn’t have that much capital.
So even if you were only putting a comparatively smaller amount of capital on the things they were taking more of total portfolio. But Jordan, do you want to carry on with that and then we’ll turn to Jon?
Jordan Licht: Yes. Look, Chris, I think you hit on some of the right points. Obviously, from a mass perspective, the increasing in transaction size is going to slowly over time, increase the average size of an asset. That being said, I think, Chris, you hit on the right point, which is that overall diversification when you think about it with respect to client concentration or the asset type in terms of commercial versus arbitration versus patent and so forth. We consistently monitor that and I don’t think that we have any undue or different exposure levels now than we’ve reported in the past and that, that diversification is consistent with years past. I’m actually going to steal from Jon one part of the YPF question and which was how did the values change in the fourth quarter.
And I’ll just remind folks that like every asset, given our valuation methodology, the change in discount rates and duration have slight changes to the change in value. And so you’re going to see that in every asset class in every asset, regardless period-over-period, regardless if you saw a specific milestone occur in that period.
Jonathan Molot: And actually, just before turning to the YPF specific question, I did want to address the question about diversification and ticket size, which is I wanted to remind everyone that we — I’m often asked this question about are we looking for a particular kind of case? Are we too full on one case and looking for another. And we have built this business by making sure for everyone in the market for legal assets, whether it’s companies or law firms, we are a taker if the risk reward on the individual matter is attractive. And so we have teams that are able to underwrite in various jurisdictions, various subject matters, whether it is investors state arbitration, commercial arbitration and I trust intellectual property contract breach in various jurisdictions.
