Trinity Capital Inc. (NASDAQ:TRIN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Casey Alexander: Hi. Good afternoon. This might be a little bit of a rambling question, and it refers to a lot of things that you’ve already said, but I mean just stepping back for a second and looking at the fact that at 0.93 times or 0.94 times, you’re under levered on the balance sheet, which would argue 2 things to me. One, that you would take your foot off the gas of the ATM program; and two, even though the JV is not anywhere near scale and not really contributing much income, you would likely not contribute a lot to the JV right now until you reach a more fulsome leverage level on balance sheet, which would be the best way to maximize your earnings. And so I was just wondering if you could speak that because that mix is — seems to make sense to me that things should go on balance sheet first until you’re at a more fulsome leverage then perhaps you can tap some of the ATM and start to build the JV to scale?

Kyle Brown: Yes. Casey, this is Kyle. I think Gerry and Mike will add on to it. I think you’re looking at a point in time, right? We had a pretty significant pipeline, some of which got pushed, right, into Q4. So there’s that effect a bit. But I think we can do both, Casey. I think what we’re trying to do is keep that leverage lower so that we have – we saw this. We saw this when [SUB] went down. There were suddenly some pretty significant opportunities. And if you’re highly leveraged at that point, you had less liquidity, you had less opportunity to take advantage of it was a difficult time, and we really want to position ourselves to the opportunistic, which I think creates outsized returns for shareholders. And so I think there’s this combination that we have the pipeline, right, and we can put the money to work.

There’s this really interesting balance of continuing to issue some new shares — utilize our off-balance sheet funds while keeping that leverage in a position where we’ve got a lot of liquidity available to us. And so if we can continue that up into the right trajectory of earnings, dividend increases, while also doing those other things, I mean that’s the sweet spot.

Gerry Harder: And I guess one other point after three quarters, Q4, Q1, Q2 of very low early repayments, we’d see a substantial uptick on that within Q3, right? And this isn’t something we can predict, right? So we have to capitalize the business to be opportunistic. We can’t count on those early repayments. But when they come, you might see that reflected in the leverage ratio as of September 30. And I think that’s what you’re seeing.

Casey Alexander: Right. Thank you. That’s my only question.

Kyle Brown: Thanks, Casey.

Operator: And we have reached the allotted time for our Q&A session. I would like to now turn the call back to CEO, Steve Brown for closing remarks.

Steve Brown: Thank you. We’d like to thank everybody for participating today, and we look forward to being in touch with you after the holidays. One final note, as a reminder, I want to highlight that members of the Trinity management team will be attending the Jefferies BDC Summit in New York on November 15. If you’re interested in meeting with us at this event, please reach out to Ben or your Jefferies representative. Thanks again. And one last note, go deep back, let’s keep it going.

Operator: This does conclude today’s program. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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