Portman Ridge Finance Corporation (NASDAQ:PTMN) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Lynch of KBW. Your line is open.

Ryan Lynch: Hi, good morning. A follow up on kind of the question regarding just kind of the movement in NAV. I know in some of the past quarters also, you talked about kind of a lot of your markdowns are more kind of market related versus credit related. This quarter, I think a lot of BDCs, and I know you can’t speak for the other ones, but, but you’re certainly going to be compared to other ones, actually had some NAV increases because credit was relatively stable, and they sort of started to write some of those mark-to-market losses up a little bit in the quarter. You guys actually had some markdowns this quarter. So how should we think about that from a comparative standpoint, if a lot of these previous markdowns that you had in your books were truly mark-to-market sort of spread-widening markdowns. When should we expect and why aren’t we seeing any sort of recovery yet?

Patrick Schafer: Yes. So a couple of different answers to that, Ryan. I’d say, broadly speaking, and again, we — similar to others, I suppose, but we send out a majority — again, this is across our platform. But a majority of our names in Portman Ridge as well. But a majority of our names to third-party valuation firms and generally speaking, the kind of collective market rates, market yields kind of how you ever want to think about how they do sort of their discounts discount rates on the cash flows for debt securities, generally speaking was flat over the course of the quarter. So again, if you kind of think about our initial conversation or Ted’s initial remarks about kind of continuing to be able to put out new dollars at kind of 150 basis points wide of kind of what we were doing a year ago, you still have elevated returns in sort of the new-issue market, which, again, in our view and the view of our third-party valuation firms does put a bit of a ceiling in terms of sort of recovery to par if you have assets that are still priced at L475, L5, L525 , et cetera.

So again, I think the market is generally speaking — kind of holding up well, but when you just — when you look at a portfolio in aggregate, just new money being put out at a certain price, there’s just only so much increase you could expect from your book from yield perspective. And then the last — and the additional — so that’s kind of broadly speaking. So that’s why our book as a whole, I’d say kind of generally speaking, was sort of flat to maybe slightly up on an individual asset level perspective, just from a market yield. And then specifically, we had a relatively meaningful markdown on one position, Lucky Bucks Holdings, which again would be credit specific and credit driven. So again, I would say that a decent chunk of our NAV markdown was from that one specific asset.

Ryan Lynch: Okay. Understood. And then following up on our question, I understand the difference. Obviously, net leverage came down a bit this quarter ex cash. You guys are now within your leverage range. So I guess as we sit here today, you guys from a net leverage standpoint, I think are now within your range. How should we think about where you want to take leverage from this point because you guys are in the range but at the higher end of the range. On one hand, you have a deal environment really good as far as the quality of deals out there, probably not a lot of deals to be done, but the quality of deals are really high. At the same time, we’re coming into a choppier probably economic period where I think we all basically every agency expecting rise in default and we’ve seen rise in fall in the BDC space, which would maybe speak to it may be better to have lower leverage.