Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Gladstone Investment Corporation's Second Quarter Ended September 30, 2015, Earnings Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to David Gladstone. Sir, you may begin.

Well, thank you, Tricia. We like those nice introductions, and hello and good morning to everybody out there. This is David Gladstone, your Chairman, and this is the quarterly earnings conference call for shareholders and for analysts for Gladstone Investment, common stock traded on NASDAQ symbol GAIN. We have some preferred stock out as well, GAINO, GAINP, GAINN, so you have your choice of preferred stocks with this company as well. Thank you all for calling in. We love these moments that we have with loyal shareholders that like to listen to these calls and potential shareholders. And we like to give you an update on the company and its investments, and we like to give you a view of the business environment from our point of view. I wish we could do this more often and try to do this sometimes with some press releases, but we've never gotten around to that. Also, the invitation is open if you're visiting this area, the -- McLean is outside Washington, D.C. so please stop by and say hello. We have about 64 people now. I think we only got about 60 here. Now we'll hear from our General Counsel, Secretary Michael LiCalsi. Michael is also our President of Gladstone Administration, which serves as the administrator for all of the Gladstone funds and related companies. He'll make a statement regarding forward-looking statements and some other important information.

Good morning, everyone. This conference call may include statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements with regard to the future performance of the company, and these statements inherently involve certain risks and uncertainties and other factors even though they're based on our current plans, which we believe to be reasonable. Many of these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as anticipates, believes, expects, intends, will, should, may and similar expressions. There are many factors that may cause our actual results to be materially different from any future results that are expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, including those factors listed under the caption Risk Factors in our Form 10-Q filing or Form 10-K filing and our registration statement as filed with the SEC, all of which can be found on our website, www.gladstoneinvestment.com, or the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. And the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date of this conference call, except as required by law. And please also note that past performance or market information is not a guarantee of future results. Please take the opportunity to visit our website, gladstoneinvestment.com, and sign up for our e-mail notification service. You can also find us on Facebook, keyword, the Gladstone Companies, and on Twitter, @GladstoneComps. The presentation today will be an overview of results through September 30, 2015, and for more detailed information, please read our press release issued yesterday and review our 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2015, which we filed with the SEC yesterday. You can access the press release and 10-Q on our website, gladstoneinvestment.com. Now let's turn to Dave Dullum, President of Gladstone Investment, to get an update on the fund's performance and outlook.

Well, Mike, thanks very much for that, and good morning, everybody, on the call. Usually, I try to just give a very brief reminder or recap, so to speak, of what it is we do here at Gladstone Investment. And of course, as everyone knows, we are a publicly traded fund. We are focused on buying businesses, generally U.S. businesses, with annual sales anywhere from roughly $20 million to $100 million. We structure our deals in these buyouts to usually consist of secured first and second lien debt and in a combination with the direct equity investment, because that is where we generate and have our significant ownership position and, ultimately, capital gains. So this combination of using debt and equity does produce a mix of assets, which is really the basis of our investment strategy for Gladstone Investment, whereby the debt portion of the investments provide the income to pay and grow our monthly distributions, and at the same time, we look to the equity portion, of course, to increase in value and provide the capital gains over time. And we'll be able to chat some more about that. So we might ask how are we different from other BDCs or other typical finance-type companies like us, and basically, one very significant difference with us and other BDCs is that we take significant equity positions in the companies that we invest in. And this differs from other public BDCs, generally, that are predominantly debt-focused, and usually those are referred to as credit-oriented BDCs. So for instance, where the proportion of equity to debt for the investments in our portfolio is approximately 25:75 ratio, you'll find that most of the "credit-oriented BDCs", in their portfolio, they'll typically be at around 10%:90% or 10:90 ratio of equity to debt. And as…

Sure. Thanks, Dave, and good morning, everyone. As Dave just discussed, the fund had a strong quarter. Through this quarter's originations, together with highly successful originations last year, we achieved over $13.7 million in total investment income in the September quarter or 8.1% quarter-over-quarter growth. For the balance sheet at the end of September, we had over $508 million in assets, consisting of $490.6 million in investments at fair value, $5.7 million in cash and cash equivalents and nearly $12 million in other assets. Our portfolio's allocation at cost is currently $387 million of debt securities and $143 million of equity securities or a 73%:27% debt-to-equity allocation. Our liabilities and equity at September 30 consisted of $103.5 million in borrowings outstanding on our credit facility, $121.7 million in term preferred stock, $9.1 million in other liabilities and over $274 million in equity. Our net asset value was $9.05 per share as of September 30, down $0.19 from June 30, which primarily resulted from net unrealized depreciation of $3.4 million this quarter, which we will discuss in more detail later on the call. Consistent with the previous 2 quarters, we continue to use an external third-party valuation specialist to provide additional data points regarding market comparables and other information related to certain of our more significant equity investments. We will continue this practice and will plan to generally update this externally provided data on an annual basis for all of our significant equity investments. Moving over to the income statement. For the September quarter-end, total investment income was $13.7 million versus $12.7 million in the prior quarter. Total expenses, net of credits, were $7.7 million versus $7.5 million in the prior quarter, leaving net investment income of $6 million versus $5.2 million in the prior quarter or an increase of over…

All right. Thank you, Melissa, and that was a good report, same good report from Michael and Dave. And during the past quarter, we were able to report some great accomplishments, such as good origination, increasing our net investment income, of course, successfully exiting one portfolio company at a good return. Several more of our portfolio companies are moving closer to be sold. The one I've been mentioning on the call for, I don't know, last 6 months, has finally signed the definitive deal document, and we're waiting for the final funding to close. I'm hopeful that's in the very near future. I'm afraid to give any projections on that anymore. And if it does close, it should generate a significant capital gain for our funds. And one of our companies is even talking about doing a public offering. We only own a small part of that, but it would be significant. So lots of activity in this company and future outlook of this fund is very good. And we expect to explore an increase in dividend sometime in the near future. I know it doesn't help much when the fund pays an extra dividend, but sometimes we have to use that technique to eliminate taxes and comply with government regulations. So just to recap, the September quarter closed a new investment, $21 million, exited one investment and result in over $1.5 million in dividend income, and sold a company that had gone through a lot of past problems to sort of get that one out of the way and free up people to work on new deals. We believe we can continue this success going to the next few quarters, and after that, we should have some running room to move even faster. As you probably can tell, I'm…