But so we kind of came to the view, we did specials a couple of times. It became very predictable what would happen, but it didn’t in our opinion, reward long term shareholders. Obviously it got money to long term shareholders, but there was some benefit of invariably, someone got a lucky break, and some guy sold the stock at 3:59 pm, the day before as well. So what we’ve gotten to is more of this kind of dripping the supplementals out when we need to. We think a $0.14 as the base distribution right now. We’ve been doing the attitude to deal with spillover income, but to kind of reward people over a longer period of time. We reevaluate this based on taxable income every single quarter. Obviously, when the Board met last week, we extended it through the end of June.
But even without that, even at $.14, we think the stock is still a very attractive high earning high cash flowing stock to own in a portfolio. But I think we’re going to broadly get away from big chunky specials. And when we have taxable income, we do have to pay out substantially all of our taxable income. We’ll try to trickle it out, more of how we’ve been doing lately, then do those big blocks.
Matthew Howlett: Great. Appreciate that. And look at the high end, no one’s complaining, it’s a high enough yield.
Tom Majewski : Yeah. No one’s ever complained. The number of happy messages I get when we do a special is great. But we were a long term player. We want to reward long term shareholders and the best way to do that we think is a drip, not a splash.
Matthew Howlett: Great, thanks. And the last one, the new issue market, you made some just comments on them. And what did they help? I know you’re primarily looking at the secondary market? But what are your expectations ’24 for M&A and new issue? And what’s the new kind of — what’s in vogue now with CLO deals? Anything interesting about them structurally wise? Something that that might be interesting? It’s new, just give us an update on some of your expectations?
Tom Majewski : Yeah, so most of the market last year, I think we said this in the prepared remarks, our estimate is about 80% of the market was taken by captive investors, where the collateral manager was the person who turned up at the table with the majority of the equity. It might be their own money, it might be client money, who knows where, but the person who leaves with management fees was the person who turned up with the equity. We did a very small number of CLOs last year on a new issue basis and very close to zero or no refunds or reset. That said it’s — that universe has changed significantly. And even so far this year, we have done a number of new CLOs at Eagle Point where we’ve been as a firm, the majority equity investor.
And some of that is attributable to — we have a handful of loans accumulation facilities on our books. I’m looking at the portfolio, we’ve got about 1.4% of the portfolio based on the January Tear Sheet in loan accumulation facilities. Those are basically tickets. So whenever it’s good time to do a CLO, everyone wants to do a CLO. And when it’s a bad time no one wants to do one, it seems. What we do is, with the collateral managers that we know we’re going to want to be working with when the markets right, we’ll keep a small amount of loans. We’ll have all the papers set, all the economic terms agreed. And if loans dip, they can buy some, if loans go up, they can sell some, but we’ve kind of got the tickets punched, so that when it makes sense to do new CLOs we got everything.
We’re — people are — oh my goodness, it’s a great idea. Let’s try and figure it out. We’ve got all the groundwork laid out. So I think we’re going to see an increase in third party new issue CLO activity this year, which suggests that the returns are pretty good. M&A activity probably picks up. But even without that, there’s still the loan market $1.31 trillion, $1.4 trillion depending on whose numbers you look at. And while CLOs make up a significant part of that process, usually the majority of that, whether we’re buying new loans or secondary loans, there’s usually always enough loans to buy to get into CLOs. But I would expect to see us doing more on the new side and more on the refi and reset side which is just unlocking value in our existing portfolios.
Matthew Howlett: Great, well, congrats on the 10 year anniversary. That growth is tremendous, should be over a $1 billion market cap in no time. And congratulations, look forward to another great year.
Tom Majewski : Thanks very much. And we got — we shared — shareholders got their full IPO price back as of January 31. We’re one penny short, as of December, but that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And we hope to get another $20 back to people, no assurances, obviously. But we’ll try as soon as we can. So…
Matthew Howlett: You made a lot of people happy. It’s a tremendous accomplishment.
Tom Majewski : Thank you.
Operator: Our next question is from Steven Bavaria with inside the income factor. Please proceed with your question.
Steven Bavaria: Hi, Tom.
Tom Majewski : Hey, Steve. Good morning.
