Ross Haberman: Just connected to that vis-à-vis when you’re looking for new books of business or other companies, do you weigh that option as opposed to continuing to be maybe more aggressive in terms of buying back your own shares, which is a better option?
Jay Brown: That is a perfect question that we debate continuously at our Board in terms of what the benefits of buying back shares versus potentially either putting the accelerator down and trying to grow organically faster or adding books of business. I think at this point in time, at this share price, obviously, any shares that we could buy back anything resembling close to where it is right now, are very, very accretive to book value and create value for all shareholders when that occurs. So we’re going to continue to try and explore that over the short term for a portion of our excess capital.
Ross Haberman: Thank you.
Operator: We have another question from the webcast from Michael Obrien. It seems like a buyback program is a no-brainer at this level. Why not be more proactive on buyback?
Jay Brown: I think I kind of answered that with the last question. So unless there’s a follow-on, I think we’ll let it ride with what I already answered.
Operator: The next is from Andrew Vindigni. Any consideration on for a special dividend understanding that this may not be a tax efficient though?
Jay Brown: The question is, is there any interest in doing a special dividend? One of the things that is unique about our structure as a publicly traded limited partnership, a majority of the dividends that we distribute are deemed as return of capital, given most investors and most shareholders basis. So unlike a lot of companies where it is not necessarily tax efficient to do special dividends. We look at that through a slightly different lens in evaluating whether that’s a good thing to do. And again, that sits with the other uses of excess capital that’s continuously evaluated by our Board.
Operator: And we have a follow-up question from Dan Baldini of Aubron. Please go ahead.
Unknown Analyst: Thanks. So at some point, I can’t remember last year, you announced that you’d received interest in what inbound interest in Penn-America and then you announced that you were reviewing alternatives for Penn-America and the entire company, I believe. And then a few months later, you announced that those discussions ended. And I imagine it’s because any of this interest that came in, was that a valuation that you didn’t agree with? And now in these James River stories that were out there, maybe they’re wrong, mentioned that you were considering paying in part for James River with stock. And I’m just curious, are there any sort of circumstances under which you give away shares at the current valuation in an acquisition?
Jay Brown: It takes a very unusual situation given where our shares are currently trading to use our shares in any kind of an acquisition. We have — obviously, we have a large amount of excess capital, which would be the first thing we would tap before we consider any share issuance, once in a while you run across a transaction that, for a variety of reasons, you might want to use stock but that’s a pretty rare occurrence. As to any comments about a transaction that was at or was potentially discussed with James River, I can’t offer any commentary.
Operator: We have another follow-up question from Tom Kerr of Zacks Investment Research. Please go ahead.
Tom Kerr: Yes. Just a quick one on the investment. I’ve heard you guys comment on the level of equity securities in a long time, remains at low level, $17 million on a $1.3 billion portfolio. Any change in thinking on that increasing equity securities investments?
Jay Brown: Our Board is — has been playing — we played defense. As I think you know from our history 2 years ago, in making a decision to dramatically shorten our investment portfolio and to liquidate our then portion of equity securities. We are looking at what our long-term portfolio should look like as we go through this period of interest rates, which are starting to stabilize and perhaps eventually kind of come down a bit or even maybe more likely stay sideways. At that point, it becomes — behooves us to start making changes in our portfolio composition from what is essentially right now, 100% short-duration fixed income portfolio. Personally, from my perspective, it always makes sense to have a portion of your portfolio in equity securities. And that I would expect that you’ll see that redeployment take place sometime in the next couple of years in our portfolio.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference back over to Steve Ries for closing remarks.
Steve Ries: Thank you, Kathleen, and thank you everybody for joining us for our first quarter ’24 call. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to me, and we look forward to talking to you after the second quarter.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today’s call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.
