Our return on — our annualized core operating expenses as a percentage of the managed portfolio is now 5.9% for the quarter of ’23 is flat from the fourth quarter of ’22. But on an annualized basis, the ’23 period came in at 5.7% is a reduction from the 6.1% we saw in 2022. So we’re starting to see some operating leverage improvement as the portfolio grows. Our return on managed assets for the quarter, 1.3% for the year, it’s 2.1% versus 4.6% in 2022. That’s it for the financial results. I’ll turn the call over to Brad.
Charles Bradley: Thank you, Danny. As you can hear from both the reports that as much as ’22 wasn’t the best of the years, we’ve done quite well through it in many different areas. Looking at the industry, it’s kind of about that. Everyone is still struggling with the ’22 paper. And even in some cases, some people’s ’23 paper has not started out particularly well either. But since ours is, we’re kind of happy where we sit there. And I think it’s going to create some opportunities for the company and that people are certainly going to be kind of conservative going forward, at least until they understand that their models are working again where they’ve corrected their model sufficiently to where people can grow again. So we might have a little bit of a head start in terms of getting back in the game than some of our friendly competitors.
There’s certainly will be some opportunities that probably one or two of the folks won’t make it. That might be interesting opportunity wise, but also the fact that we can start growing again and sort of put ’22 behind us and be proud of what we did in ’22. But again, in terms of our — what we want the company to do, we’d like to get back to that game much more than we have been. Also, you would think at some point down the road, they have some lower rates. And with a lower rate environment, obviously, our margins improve. Our performance will be great that way. So towards the end of this year, in ’24, that might be a benefit as well. In terms of the overall economy, who knows whether we’ll have a hypothetical soft landing, but it’s certainly looking like we might get somewhere there.
But generally speaking, we think it’s going to be a decent economy, if not a good economy. So we’re happy along those fronts. Almost most important by far in any of that is unemployment. Unemployment looks great. Unemployment is the one thing that can cause our industry problems. It does not appear to be a problem at all. It shouldn’t be a problem for a long time or at least significantly amount of time so we can get growing again and to really take advantage of the position we’re in. So and we said that ’22 was tough, ’23 was sort of that transition from making ’22 go away and getting things ready to go for ’24. So now that we’re in ’24, hopefully, it’s all full steam ahead and a bright future. And again so it’s still kind of remarkable that through all that, our company has done so well in terms of how our paper performed in ’22 and even ’23.
So we were super, super proud of our people and what we’ve done to do it and certainly think ’23 and everything we’ve done during ’23 has well positioned us for ’24 to be a very good year. I want to thank you all for joining us today, and we’ll be back to you rather soon with our first quarter report in a month or so. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s teleconference. A replay will be available beginning two hours from now for 12 months via the company’s website at www.consumerportfolio.com. Please disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.
End of Q&A:
