Saratoga Investment Corp. (NYSE:SAR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

We supported it with follow-on capital for them to do some acquisitions. That investment grew to a pretty healthy size. I can’t remember the exact number. And then most recently, they did a much larger acquisition that would have brought that facility as a unitranche to over $100 million, which is something that was too large for us to carry on our balance sheet. But given the performance of the business, the experience that we had in the deal for at least a couple of years directionally before we upsized it at that point. We were very comfortable with the credit profile. And rather than see that portfolio company exit and not having our shareholders get the benefit of the continued earnings stream. In that case, we brought in a first-out partner, and we’re able to upsize the facility, continue to support the portfolio company, and we also have equity in that investment, and that business continues to perform exceedingly well.

So that’s kind of a — it’s a microcosm of, sort of, how we look at certain deals or how we’re approaching deals in the marketplace and an example of our first-out last-last out scenario.

Casey Alexander: Well, thank you for that. I’m pleased that I could ask a question that would prompt all three of you to participate in the answer. My second question is, can you give some more color on the defaulted assets in the CLO and how that may impact its structure, its requirements and potentially it’s cash flow?

Christian Oberbeck: Well, maybe I’ll start with that, Casey, on sort of on a high level. The CLO has round numbers plus and minus like a couple of hundred credits. And so there’s a lot going on inside the CLO. And then the CLO also has a fairly complex roll up to value, if you will, with waterfalls and things like that. And so it’s not necessarily the easiest thing to predict from a distance, how it behaves and how it operates. But inside of…

Casey Alexander: I guarantee you, it’s impossible to predict for those of us sitting outside of the company.

Christian Oberbeck: Yes, right. And so especially on a quarter-on-quarter basis, and there’s like BB credits are highly desired right now. So those are trading extraordinarily well. Single B are less desirable, because they’re closer to CCC and then CCC credits are not trading very well at all, because people don’t want them. They have baskets that are kind of full. There is supply and demand issues out there where they have a lot of CLO formation in the beginning of the year and then less just recently, and then you combine that with not that much issuance, because the larger buyouts are not happening at the same rate at four, and so you have all these different crosscurrents in the marketplace, which result in sort of different credits and different assets, different pricing, given what goes on.

Like for example, a restructuring credit that might trade at $50 million, we mentioned in our conversation that the whole portfolio has recovered maybe one-third of where it was marked — what it was marked down from May 31. But inside of that, anything trading at $50 million probably didn’t move, right, where something trading in the 90s might have moved up a lot more. And so you have all those dynamics underlying at all. But I think the — it’s hard to, again, take sort of individual pieces of the puzzle and then try and assemble the whole puzzle because there’s like a 1,000 pieces to this puzzle. And so the way we look at it is, we’ve been in the CLO from the beginning. We have a second CLO, which has been added to it. And if you’d look — and we — and the CLO has been through a lot of different markets, right?