Portman Ridge Finance Corporation (NASDAQ:PTMN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Patrick Schafer: Ryan, let me just start quickly — this is Patrick. Let me start quickly on the timing. So particularly for Portman, our CLO, which is the bulk, not the bulk, but it is over 50% of our floating rate liabilities, resets in the middle of the quarter, specifically reset at the end of November. So we are on a bit of a different cadence where the majority of our liabilities on a floating rate reset during the quarter. So depending on when the actual Fed rate hikes are over the course of a period time, we can get a bit of a mismatch there, because of the timing of that reset. So again, when you kind of roll it forward, and we discussed and we show in our presentation, kind of the $0.1 on a run rate basis. There is not a significant amount of further increase in our liabilities, because of where they were reset to during the fourth quarter.

So that’s why we specifically highlighted some of the timing differences. But I’ll turn it over to Jason to kind of go through some of the income numbers themselves. But just wanted to throw that out there on the timing. We have a bit of a unique situation, because of when a big chunk of our floating rate liabilities reset.

Jason Roos: Okay. Yes. And there’s some netting impacts happening there. So if you look at quarter-over-quarter, you see purchase accretion kind of running off at a clip of about $500,000. So that’s a piece of income that has to be offset with the interest rates throughout the quarter. If you look at, and pure interest, we are up well over $1.2 million to plus million dollars quarter-over-quarter on the interest alone. That’s offset a little bit by that accretion I was mentioning. Fees quarter-over-quarter slightly down, call it, closer to $200,000 to $270,000. CLO income was down and we can talk more about that. But those are some of the drivers really just offsetting to get to a net increase quarter-over-quarter on net investment income.

Ryan Lynch: Yes. Why would steel low income down so much more important? And if that — is that quarter run rate. Is that a good run rate to expect going forward?

Jason Roos: Yes. The CLOs are on the accounting model for that is a beneficial interest method. And as you reset your basis in the assets and you calculate your IRR over the life of the future cash flows. And as those cash flows move around your IRR will change, which drives your yield, and that’s what drives your interest income on those CLOs. As a result of the embedded cash flows that future cash flow expected stream decreasing, just given the market environment we’re in, that that yield is coming down, which is what’s driving the reduction in that yield.

Ted Goldthorpe : Yeah, so the shorthand there is, is the actual price of the CLOs that are marked at has an impact on what we recognize from a revenue perspective. So the marks on CLOs being down quarter over quarter, lead to less revenue being recognized. It’s not necessarily a cash flow from the securities being down necessarily. So in theory, if we were to mark up the CLOs next quarter, you would see an increase in the revenue, roughly speaking because of that. But it’s a little bit more of a revenue recognition as opposed to underlying cash flows of the CLOs.

Jason Roos : Yeah, and I think, it’s fair to say, and the same thing happened in 2020 and other periods of time, but I think the third-party valuation firms change their methodology around how they account for CLOs in terms of how they view defaults and future defaults. And so that — they made a change in the fourth quarter, which obviously had an impact not only on income, but also on valuations.