Sixth Street Specialty Lending, Inc. (NYSE:TSLX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And the fundamentals of that market my guess are going to weaken. Downgrades are outpacing upgrades recoveries have been low. And so a lot of those a lot of the existing CLOs are going to start amortizing and people are going to have to find and they’re subject to weighted-average life tests et cetera. So, the fundamentals are weakening slightly the technicals are not great. Capital is going to have to find a new home, and some of it’s going to flow as an opportunity set into the private market. And I wouldn’t call — I wouldn’t necessarily think that’s all adverse selection. Although, people are going to have different views on what that should be priced at and what are good credits and bad credits, et cetera. And by the way, I’m not suggesting the deals that we’ve passed on were bad credits.

So I don’t think, there’s a — hey, all these things are going to be adversely selected, in addition to that sponsors and companies have different business models and might need new capital and might — which won’t be available and might value certainly more, which is not available in the broadly syndicated loan market. So I don’t think it’s as linear as things are going to roll all the back credits are going to roll into the private credit market at all. So I think the one thing I also should note is that people talk about a maturity wall in the broadly syndicated loan market in the global financial crisis, which never really materialized. The difference between today and in 2009 and 2010 is that policymakers have the ability to lower rates and push people back into risk assets.

And today the policy makers don’t have that. So I think the maturity wall is going to have to be — it’s going to be harder to deal with.

Ryan Lynch: Okay. That’s helpful get good background thought for response and all that. The other question I had maybe for you Ian, you guys talked about some of the declines in NAV in 2022 from spread widening, you guys have had and it continued this quarter of some spread I think tightening and increase kind of an uplift from spreads. I’m just curious I know this is something we could probably calculate on our own by looking at your portfolio, but I’d just be curious if you have any sort of commentary on how much of that spread do you think is still — and meaning an uptick in loan values do you think it’s still to be recovered? Or do you think we’re kind of mostly you’re done with it at this point?

Ian Simmonds : Well, I think, we’re a little over halfway done, Ryan. So there’s a little bit more to come. Some of that will come back to us through natural repayment activity. But we’re probably let’s call it two-thirds of the way on that particular pool of assets that was in place back in June of 2022.

Joshua Easterly : Yes. I mean, I think we try to do a pretty good job of bridging it, which is some of the portfolio we try to look at the portfolio in apples-to-apples basis before the Fed rate hiking cycle started. And I think we did it on a per share basis and how much of that has come back, and then obviously the portfolio that we put in the ground in the wire spread environment most definitely as spreads have tightened got a lot of that benefit. And so I think, Kansas, I think that we’ll go back to the script as you describe — and then I think, we — I think is right. And when I look at the fair value of like 98.5% or something like that, my guess is probably going to seats right.