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Saratoga Investment Corp. (SAR)

Q2 2020 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 10, 2019

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Saratoga Investment Corp. Fiscal Second Quarter 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. Please note that today's call is being recorded. During the presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions.At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Saratoga Investment Corp's Chief Financial and Compliance Officer, Mr. Henri Steenkamp. Sir, please go ahead.

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Thank you. I would like to welcome everyone to Saratoga Investment Corp's fiscal second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements and projections. We ask you to refer to our most recent filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements and projections. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements unless required to do so by law.Today, we will be referencing a presentation during our call. You can find our fiscal second quarter 2020 shareholder presentation in the Events & Presentations section of our Investor Relations website. A link to our IR page is in the earnings press release distributed last night. A replay of this conference call will also be available from 1:00 PM today through October 17th. Please refer to our earnings press release for details.I would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Christian Oberbeck, who will be making a few introductory remarks.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Thank you, Henri, and welcome, everyone. This second fiscal quarter has been a particularly strong and important one for us, with many significant accomplishments. All of this quarter's achievements will support our efforts to build upon our industry leadership within the BDC sector and grow our high-quality portfolio, utilizing our strengthened capital and liquidity base.While a challenging and competitive environment persists, our origination efforts combined with our flexible capital solutions and diversified sources of cost-effective liquidity, continue to support our robust pipeline of available deal sources, driving greater scale.To briefly recap this past quarter's highlights on Slide 2. First, we received approval for a second SBIC license providing us access up to $175 million in additional long-term cost effective capital in the form of SBA debentures to further enable us to support our core small business constituency.Second, we continued to strengthen our financial foundation this quarter by maintaining a high level of investment credit quality, with 99% of our loan investments having our highest rating, generating a return on equity of 14.3% on a trailing 12-month basis, 14.7% annualized in Q2, both significantly beating the BDC industry mean of 8.7%, increasing NAV by a net $2.6 million realized and unrealized gain in this quarter, and registering a gross unlevered IRR of 13.5% on our total unrealized portfolio and a gross unlevered IRR of 14% on total realizations to-date of $393 million.Third, our assets under management grew to $487 million this quarter, a 19% increase from $410 million as of last quarter and a 24% increase from $393 million as of the same time last year. This quarter continues to demonstrate the success of our growing origination platform with a healthy $93 million of originations. This -- importantly, our new originations included four new portfolio company investments with two more closed…

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Thank you, Chris. Slide 4 highlights our key performance metrics for the quarter ended August 31, 2019. When adjusting for the incentive fee accruals related to net unrealized capital gains in the second incentive fee calculation, adjusted NII of $5.6 million was up 22% from $4.6 million last quarter and up 18% from $4.8 million as compared to last year's Q2.Adjusted NII per share was $0.68, down $0.01 from $0.69 per share last year, but up $0.08 from $0.60 per share last quarter. The increase in adjusted NII from last year and last quarter primarily reflects the higher level of investments and results in higher interest income with AUM up 19% from last quarter and up 24% from last year. The decrease in adjusted NII per share from last year was primarily due to a steady increase in the number of shares outstanding.Weighted average common shares outstanding increased from 6.9 million shares for the three months ended August 31, 2018 to 7.7 million shares and 8.3 million shares for the three months ended May 31, 2019 and August 31, 2019 respectively.Adjusted NII yield was 11.0% when adjusted for the incentive fee accrual. This yield is up 90 basis points from 10.1% last quarter and down 90 basis points from 11.9% last year, primarily reflecting the impact of our growing NAV and the effect of our currently undeployed capital coupled with Q2, only reflecting the partial benefit of our new investments this quarter.For the second quarter we experienced a net gain on investments of $2.6 million or $0.31 per weighted average share, resulting in a total increase in net assets resulting from operations of $7.6 million or $0.91 per share. The $2.6 million net gain on investments was comprised of $1.9 million net realized gain and $1.5 million net unrealized appreciation…

Michael Grisius

Management

Thank you, Henri. I'll take a couple of minutes to describe the current market as we see it, and then comment on our current portfolio performance and investment strategy.The highly competitive landscape that I've described in past calls has continued to intensify. Deal activity is healthy as evidenced this quarter and our pipeline remains robust. But the underlying borrower friendly conditions dominating the market still persist. Generally commercial banks and non-bank direct lenders are becoming more aggressive, exacerbating a supply and demand dynamic that tightens price and expands leverage tolerances.We continue to see no spread expansion, and in fact absolute yields continue to decline due to the impact of decreasing LIBOR with another 36 basis point reduction experienced this quarter. We have been reasonably successful in obtaining floors that reflect current market conditions on most of our new deals, which helps reduce the long-term impact of a decreasing rate environment.Overall, we have not sacrificed quality, but these dynamics have served to put downward pressure on yields generally.In the face of this kind of market, we believe sticking to our strategy has and will continue to serve us best. Our approach has always been to underwrite each investment working directly with management in ownership to make a thorough assessment of the long-term strength of the company and its business model.With the possibility of a market downturn always in our minds, we seek to invest in durable businesses. We invest capital with the objective of producing the best risk-adjusted accretive returns for our shareholders over the long-term.Having a record originations quarter does not mean that approach has changed in the least, nor has there been a change to our credit profile. In fact, our first lien proportion of investments this quarter actually increased to 63% from 54% in Q1, through a healthy…

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Thank you, Mike. As outlined on Slide 16, this past quarter, we again increased our dividend by $0.01 to $0.56, a 2% increase, the 20th sequential quarter of dividend increases representing five years of sequential increases. We are only one of two BDCs to accomplish this.Slide 17 shows that the 7.7% year-over-year dividend growth easily places us near the very top of our peers, and one of only eight BDCs have grown dividends in the past year. With most BDCs having either no increases or decreasing the size of their dividend payments, our continually increasing dividends, which we have over earned in each quarter has differentiated us within the marketplace.Moving to Slide 18, our total return over the last 12 months, which includes both capital appreciation and dividends, has generated total returns of 12%, double the BDC index of 6%. Our longer term performance is outlined on our next slide, 19.Our three and five year returns place us in the top two and four respectively of all BDCs for both time horizons. Over the past three years our 81% return exceeded the 22% return of the index and over the past five years our 161% return exceeded the index of 27% return.On Slide 20 you can further see our outperformance placed in the context of the broader industry and specific to certain key performance metrics. We continue to achieve high marks and outperform the industry across diverse categories, including interest yield on the portfolio, latest 12 months NII yield, latest 12 months return on equity, dividend coverage, year-over-year dividend growth and NAV per share growth.Of note is that as our assets have grown and we're increasingly achieving scale, our expense ratio is moving closer towards the industry averages. Notably, our latest 12 months return on equity and NAV per share…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Casey Alexander with Compass Point.

Casey Alexander

Analyst

Obviously, you guys have done a great job of managing this portfolio. I have a couple of questions. Henri, you alluded to the increase in other income as a contributing factor to the strong results this quarter. And that is a number that $1.3 million that the company has never achieved before and is well over historicals. What drove that, and to what extent is that other income recurring or not?

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Yes. Casey, absolutely, I highlighted that obviously on purpose. I think two things to consider. One is, there is no unusual items in the other income this quarter. So, there's no dividend or any other unusual items. It really includes sort of just the two things that you know you'd always expect in other income. Firstly, it's the 1% advisory fee that relates to new originations that we have in a quarter. And then secondly, there was a prepayment fee of a couple of hundred thousand that related to the realization of our Fancy Chap investment.So, no unique items in other income this quarter. However, why we highlighted it was obviously that our originations was at a very, very high level this quarter. And so, therefore that advisory fee that relates to it was at a high level as well. We always view it as partially recurring because of the fact that we are originating every single quarter, but because of the high level of originations, it was at a much higher level than it normally is as you know.

Casey Alexander

Analyst

So, that advisory fee by itself was a little less, just a little less than $1 million then based upon your originations.

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Yes. It's -- I think was a little less than that, but, yes, close, probably somewhere around $800,000.

Casey Alexander

Analyst

And secondly, when you calculate adjusted NII -- and I know it's a non-GAAP number, I'm curious why you don't also pull out the income tax benefit from that number, because that’s clearly an unusual item, not a recurring item and has dropped in maybe once a year. I'm curious why you didn't take that out of adjusted NII also?

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Yes. It's a good question. We obviously work with our accountants on sort of assessing what should be excluded from adjusted NII. As you know, non-GAAP measures have quite a high hurdle around what you can be – what you can exclude. And because the deferred tax benefits relates to our blockers and you will have an element of that every single quarter, the view has been to leave it and to not exclude it from adjusted NII. However, to your point, we have really tried to highlight it in the NII per share, a role, and also and always in our prepared remarks so that people can understand that that’s sort of a unique element to our blocker structure and strategy and can be volatile on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

Casey Alexander

Analyst

And for Michael. I have to ask, and I've discussed this before in Easy Ice, and now I’m going to lump in Censis, is the concentration issue. You have two portfolio companies that encompass almost $90 million of the portfolio, 18% of the total portfolio, 38% of net assets. I know Censis and Easy Ice have been very successful investments. But how would you suggest the investors get comfortable with that degree of concentration in just two names?

Michael Grisius

Management

I think the way we look at this, Casey, is that when we evaluate a credit, especially a new credit, we take into account the size for our investment, as well as the strength of the underlying business. One of the things that we’ve had the benefit of as we've grown our business is that we've been able to invest in businesses that have been pretty long dated investments where we've come to know the business extremely well. And as our relationship with the business has grown, and our experience with the business has grown so as our confidence in the strength of that business. And so in both of those cases, these are businesses that we've been investors in for quite some time. Censis it was 2014 and I think Easy Ice may go back to 2012 or ‘13. So fundamentally, they are businesses that we know extremely well, they're both leaders in their industry verticals that they operate in and we feel like they're fundamentally terrific investments. And that's what's giving us confidence to upsize our exposure to those two credits.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

I also want to congratulate you on a strong quarter. I want to start off by talking about -- a little bit about leverage. So back of the envelope, if you drew say half of the availability on the credit facility and half of the cash you have as of the end of the quarter for additional capital in the new SBIC subsidiary including the equity you've already injected there, then you’d have access to about $100 million of new SBA debentures. And that would take you to total debt-to-equity of 1.7 all else equal. And I do realize you've issued some equity since this quarter was reported. So that level is above the 1.5 you've been operating at the last several quarters. Are you willing to go up to the 1.7 or is the 1.5 more your comfort level or any guidance you can give us?

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Mickey, thank you for that question. I think that among the concepts we constantly talk about every quarter is the relative lumpiness of our business on a quarter-by-quarter basis. There's a lot of very good things have happened and we're very concentrated in this most recent quarter. And as we go forward, our leverage levels may fluctuate. As you point out, in our SBIC license, we funded $35 million, which gives us access to $70 million. If we put in some more, we can have access to $100 million, as you discussed. How we fund that, whether it’s more equity or more debt or cash on hand, or maybe we have redemptions that come in and fund it, that's a constantly fluid situation as to how we allocate our capital. At any given point in time, we might be relatively higher leveraged or relatively lower leveraged. I think that as -- so as we go forward, and we will be looking at -- on a case-by-case basis, and so we don't have a fixed number in terms of exactly where we think our leverage should be. We do note, however, that the structure of our leverage is, we think very sound. If you look at the SBIC debentures, our 10 year interest only bullet maturity debentures with no covenants. So there's only a requirement to pay. There is no pay the interest. No amortization at all. Our baby bonds are similar. On our structure of our baby bonds we have no maturities for four years now.

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Yes.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

And that we do have our revolving line of credit, which we go in and out of as you see depending on fluctuations in investment rates and redemptions, et cetera. And that too has no hard covenants, hard defaults in it. So we are very soundly structured, in terms of the -- in terms of how our leverage interacts with our assets. And we've been originating assets and our book of asset is mostly floating rate as you know. And as a result of that, we have -- we feel very comfortable with our leverage profile and our leverage structure.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

Thank you for that, Chris. That’s helpful. I could move on. It looks like you helped finance the dividend recap for Censis. And we're all aware that dividend recaps are usually looked at pretty skeptically by the market. So I'd like to understand what was the thesis behind that particular transaction?

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Yes. What -- I'm trying to figure out exactly what I can relate to you. I think what I said in my prepared remarks is the company is performing exceedingly well. We have a very high degree of confidence in the management team that we know well, as well as the equity sponsorship. The company had an opportunity to recapitalize itself. We actually believe that we recapitalized it, Mickey, on terms that were better than market. We know that the market -- the company had offers to finance the business and refinance the capital structure on terms that were much more aggressive than what we proposed. But given the fact that we are in the deal already and knew the management team very well, and most importantly, the ownership group, we were in the pole position to lead that financing. But just in terms of the way we look at it primarily is, are we comfortable with the enterprise value of the business and do we feel like we're well covered, well supported by that enterprise value? And I would say, on that credit, we feel exceedingly comfortable with the business.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

Mike, in the dividend recap, I'm assuming the sponsor obviously got a big chunk of that. But was there also an incentive or reward paid to the management for their efforts?

Michael Grisius

Management

Well, that's -- the -- I can't get into the details of the recapitalization just given that it’s a private company. But I can say that the sponsorship that we work with typically understands how important it is to align management’s interest with their own and in this case they did a great job of doing that as well.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

Okay. Mike, your investments this quarter were overwhelmingly focused on first liens. And I appreciate the thoughts behind that. But the portfolio’s average leverage continues to climb. So, I'd like to understand what's driving that increase? Is it lending to larger companies, which may deserve a higher multiple or is it just how difficult the market environment is or was it something else?

Michael Grisius

Management

I think, from our perspective, we always just evaluate each credit on its own merits. And we've always said that, just because the credit is a low leverage credit, it doesn't necessarily make it a good deal. And we pass on those transactions all the time and did so this quarter. So, it's really just reflective of the opportunities that we saw before us. The thing I would point out in our originations this quarter, it might give you some more color, and it’s reflective of a playbook that we've capitalized on for years, $56 million of that production this quarter was in follow-on investments to very well performing companies, and then $36 million of it was to businesses that are new portfolio companies.We've been very successful doing the work to get close to businesses, one that are at a smaller stage of their development and doing the work to write a smaller check at the front end and that's put us in the pole position to support the company as they grow over time, and that's what we did a lot of this quarter and have done a lot of successfully over time. And if you look at some of the most successful investments that we've made and exited over time, certainly we upsized Censis this quarter, but if you look historically, deals like Community Investors and Expedited and HMN and [MTP] and Mercury, I'm just taking off the top of my head, were many of our most successful investments. They started off smaller and we grew with them. As the companies grew, the leverage profile grew as well, getting back to your question. And so, some of those follow-ons also were situations where the company's credit profile grew quite a bit and we expanded the leverage profile consistent with that.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

So, there’s not a meaningful deterioration of EBITDA on the portfolio that's causing the multiple [decline]?

Michael Grisius

Management

No. We feel very good about the performance of the underlying portfolio. We're not seeing any trends that would reflect softness in our portfolio at all.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

Okay. And sticking to risk-management, again I understand that you have been focused on first liens but second liens are still meaningful proportion of the portfolio. Could you give us a sense of the relative risk in your first versus second lien investments in terms of the size of the borrowers, maybe their average leverage or overall how you manage that risk?

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Well, the way we manage that risk -- and it's the approach that we've taken all along. We recognize that there's the talk in the marketplace about whether a strategy for BDCs has to be in second lien or in first lien and we've never really taken that broad brush approach. We've always said, let's evaluate the business gain comfort with the underlying credit metrics of that business. And once we assess a business and feel like we understand it, then we figure out where we feel is appropriate to position ourselves in the balance sheet. So in some cases a business that is strong enough will get comfortable making a second lien investment. Certainly the bar is higher for a second lien investment than a first lien investment. There certainly are deals that we will look at and we will have a second lien opportunity to invest. And we don't feel comfortable being in that position in the balance sheet. There are other deals where we look at and say being dollar one in the capital structure is a safer place to be, we feel like that's a position where our chance to recoup our capital if things don't go right is much better. So that's a place where we will deploy capital.So, we think about it that way but we don't think about it in broad strokes where we say let's allocate X percent of our portfolio to second lien and Y percent to first lien. It really is a function of looking at each deal, evaluating the strength of the credit and determining where we want to play in the balance sheet.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

I understand. Just a couple of more questions focused on the CLO. I see that the estimated yields came down and that's consistent with what I am seeing elsewhere. Could you give us a sense of what changes in your assumptions were made that caused that reduction?

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Yes. Sure, Mickey. If you look at sort of that $2.7 million, really the reason why there was that unrealized depreciation is two different buckets, and they're sort of almost 50-50. The first one is just the fact that we are getting a larger obviously equity distribution now and that therefore as a starting point that will reduce the fair value. And so, probably about a half of the change relates to that. The other half of the change relates to any changes in your inputs that you include in your model and the largest by far and the main driver of that other 50% of the change was the discount rate as I noted in my comments. We actually increased it by 200 basis points which we believe was appropriate and that drove obviously a significant decrease or significant unrealized depreciation.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

No, I appreciate that Henri and I did see the change in the discount rate and that's also consistent with what I'm seeing elsewhere. I was referring to the estimated yield of the equity of the CLO. It was down from 19.5 to 16, which implies you've become more pessimistic about something or the cash flow is perhaps not performing well? That's what I was asking about.

Henri Steenkamp

Management

No. So on the estimated yield, it’s obviously an output from the actual valuation. So once you’ve put in all your cash flows and then once you discount it based on your input such as the discount rate, that would drive the effective interest yield down. So again the primary driver of that was also the discount rate change which resulted in a lower valuation and a larger adjustment to the cash flows, which brought the weighted average effective interest rate down.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

But Mickey, just one comment though. None of this a reflection of the credit in the portfolio. This is more about -- it's about market change ….

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

The cash flow was still performing well.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

… arbitrage differentials. Yes.

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Correct. Yes. The -- obviously, most of the inputs that go into the valuation, like the discount rates are driven by market comparables primarily.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · Ladenburg.

Right, yes. And that market has been very weak, I understand. Those are all my questions this morning. I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Tim Hayes with B. Riley FBR.

Tim Hayes

Analyst · B. Riley FBR.

My first one, just as you noted, growth, obviously very strong this quarter, and the portfolio is performing very well. You guys seem pretty optimistic overall. But you look at the NFIB survey data and you see that small businesses continue to report they're facing headwinds with trade, rising labor costs, margin compression, all that good stuff. How do you balance growth in light of these headwinds? And as a follow up and you kind of touched on this a bit, Michael on Mickey's question, but we've seen you guys move more first lien and invest in some more healthcare services companies over the past couple of quarters, would you say this is an intentionally defensive move on your part to position the portfolio for the later stages of the cycle or it’s just a function of what's in the pipeline?

Michael Grisius

Management

Let me answer them in order. So the first question was, are we seeing any headwinds in the smaller -- small to medium sized businesses that we support? And we haven't seen that. If you think about our portfolio, for instance trade, most of the businesses that we invest in, lend to, really are doing a whole lot of international trade or affected by that too much. And when you look at -- another example you highlighted was higher labor costs. Most of the businesses that we have in our portfolio have really strong margin profiles. And they're very efficient. So they can withstand a little bit of increase in labor costs, and still ride through that very successfully. So we really haven't seen those headwinds in our portfolio. We're always on the watch for that. We don't invest entirely thinking about macro trends. We're always investing thinking what if there's a downturn and evaluating a business with the assumption that during our investment period, there will be a downturn and try to determine how well that business could hold up. And that'll affect our interest in moving forward on a deal or not based on that determination.As it relates to the second question, which is, are we making any moves in the portfolio to shift our concentration one way or another? And the answer there is no, not really, that's not how we think about it either. We -- the bar is higher, as I said before, on making a second lien investment, just because you're in a riskier position in the balance sheet. So there are plenty of deals that we will decide not to do if we only have an opportunity to invest in a second lien, and therefore, that'll affect, the number of transactions that we're doing in that space. But it really depends on our pipeline in a given quarter. What are the opportunities we're seeing? Even in a downturn, if we saw a business that was strong enough, and had characteristics that were just fantastic, we would evaluate doing a second lien investment. And at the same time, there are plenty of businesses that we see -- where we have an opportunity to a low leverage first lien deal and we don't think the business has sufficient strength to warrant an investment of that nature.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Tim, building on Mike's comments, I think this sort of points up on the opportunities we have at Saratoga given our size, which is relatively small and our focus, which is very much on secular growing companies. We are not necessarily buying the market or the industry or the broad economic circumstances. And I think as Mike articulated, we are very much a bottoms up driven organization in that. We're doing the transactions as they arise and we just happen to have more first liens that came about more recently. But if we had good second liens, we would have probably gotten ahead and done those too. So, we're very much driven by the bottom up but also don't have to -- we don't have to participate across the board. And so, we're very selective and we have a good fortune with our new business generation activities to be finding really attractive businesses that are kind of all weather businesses that are going to grow despite these type of headwinds.

Michael Grisius

Management

The thing I'd add to that just to emphasize the point further, we have always said that with our business model and especially with the SBIC capital that we have, we've never sought lean out on the risk spectrum. We don't need to do that. Even in this yield environment, we just need to make safe investments to get returns that are consistent with what we can get in this environment, especially at the lower end of the middle-market where those opportunities are even more abundant. And if we do that, that's highly accretive to our shareholders and that's the playbook that we've operated under, since we’ve took over management of the BDC and that's what we will continue to do.

Tim Hayes

Analyst · B. Riley FBR.

Thanks for the comments guys. That was really helpful and pretty consistent with what I feel like you guys have been saying over the past several quarters if not years. So, makes a lot of sense. And then, just on the portfolio yield, you attributed most of the decline near to LIBOR, but you also noted just how competitive it is out there and that you guys are staying pretty disciplined. But even so, would you say, spread compression played a role at all in the decline? And if so, do you anticipate any further yield compression just based off of either competitive pressures or it doesn't sound like anything with the mix of the portfolio is changing? So, I assume there is no change in yield from that standpoint.

Michael Grisius

Management

To-date, we haven't been any significant change in spread. The decline in overall yield has primarily been just a result of LIBOR.

Tim Hayes

Analyst · B. Riley FBR.

Okay. And then one last question from me. I'm going to pry a little bit here. You just mentioned that, you had two new investments in two new portfolio companies this quarter. Could you give us a size of those investments for us and give us an idea of any other investment activity so far this quarter?

Michael Grisius

Management

No. We have made a practice of not disclosing that, but we do feel very comfortable with our -- and excited about the progress that we're making with our business development efforts and the new relationships that we're building over time.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Ben Zucker with Aegis Capital.

Ben Zucker

Analyst · Aegis Capital.

Thanks for taking my questions. Most of them have been asked and answered at this point, but your deployment activity really picked up this quarter and it sounds like you guys have been spending a lot of time on business development and growing your book of relationships. So in light of that, I mean, is it fair to think that origination levels can generally be higher as we're looking ahead at least relative to kind of where your historical metrics have been? Of course, that's still understanding there is a lot of quarterly volatility and the timing of originations and repayments as largely out of your control and subject available capital.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Ben, I think that certainly, I think we're a lot better at origination than we've ever been. I think we're much more organized and we're covering many more bases out there. However, the one thing we've kind of discovered is forecasting certainly on a quarterly basis what originations and redemptions will be is really not something -- we get -- I mean, sometimes we get some visibility on our portfolio that we're going into our process and we think it's going to be over the next six months, but we've had them do that and they say, oh, we don't like the results or we want to stick around for a long curtains. So it's very unpredictable on a quarter-to-quarter basis and then we get calls and say, okay, that's it we're getting our money back or we've got an acquisition that needs to close in three weeks. And so, we -- it is not very predictable. Again, like for a sports analogy, we could focus on our inputs, but we can't focus on the results. So we think we're much better, we're doing much better. We certainly are planning and organize ourselves to have higher rates of origination as our overall asset base has grown because we need to replace all those assets. So we're doing all those things, but we are not necessarily comfortable forecasting any kind of increased level of originations.

Ben Zucker

Analyst · Aegis Capital.

No, I definitely appreciate that. It's kind of -- the business itself is a little bit like a hamster wheel I suppose. Following up on that and your comments about the market being as competitive as ever, are borrowers -- for the most part in broad stroking, are they just a lot of them looking to get as much capital as possible at the lowest rate possible or are they actually trying to align themselves with lenders that understand their business and can serve as a kind of an advisory or a business partner as well? I'm just trying to think about ways that you guys might be differentiating your capital in this environment.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Well, I think what you just described there is what we spent a lot of time talking about, which is aligning ourselves with the type of sponsors and not just sponsors, but people doing transactions where they do a value-added partner and a constructive -- creative solution-oriented provider of capital, that's where our new business efforts are focused. Those are the types of parties that give us the first look and the last look when they're coming up with originations or growth inside of their portfolio. So that is where we are trying to align ourselves. I mean, there are situations and we're at this kind of more of an auction like environment and we try to identify those and we try to avoid those. Because again, that's not the highest best use we find. We're trying to do relationship-driven, solution-oriented investment services for our relationships and we're trying to find those that appreciate that. And yes, we have to be competitive, and yes, we have to sometimes come to where the market is, but we want to be in a position where we have a sort of a preferred opportunity, rather than just bidding in general.

Michael Grisius

Management

And then I would add to that in every market, including this one, there are a subset of players who are seeking the absolute highest dollars they can get at the lowest rate. And if we start working with somebody where that behavior is clearly, if that's how they -- it becomes clear that that's how they operate, at some point, it's time to for us to move on to another relationship because we're seeking relationships with people that understand that we bring a lot to the table and understanding these businesses and supporting them over time and seek relationships where they're not focused on getting that last dollar or that you're not going to lose the deal for just basis points. We've been successful building those relationships and are seeking to continue to grow those.

Ben Zucker

Analyst · Aegis Capital.

Understood. And maybe if you let me pick on Henri for a second. On your floating rate loans, where -- I mean, historically, how have you gone about putting in floors? Are they based off of spot LIBOR, are they like 20 to 25 bps below spot? And then has that dynamic started to shift recently? And I'm just, obviously I'm getting at over the last few years when you were originating floating rate loans, there was an obvious assumption that rates were being moving higher. And over the last six months or so that's probably completely flipped. So I'm just kind of wondering if there's been any change in that practice and how you think about LIBOR floor is now that there is probably a downward bias to short-term rates?

Henri Steenkamp

Management

That's a good question. I'll answer that just because it's a negotiated item deal by deal and it's a good observation on your part as well. Back a few years ago when LIBOR was lower, the floors were lower as well. So we -- typically the way a negotiation works is that typically we're trying to set the floor as close to the current LIBOR as we can and there's some back and forth on that. And so if you looked at our portfolio a few years ago, many of the floors were in the 1% range or a bit higher and then we had the benefit of lift as LIBOR came up, but you didn't have the production on some of those older dated loans as LIBOR has come down. More recently, in the more recent originations, we've been pretty successful establishing LIBOR floors very close to where LIBOR is today. So those newer origination should have by and large good protection against further declines in LIBOR.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mitchel Penn with Janney Montgomery.

Mitchel Penn

Analyst · Janney Montgomery.

Real quick. Censis and Easy Ice, what portion of, if any, is in the SBIC subsidiary?

Henri Steenkamp

Management

Yes. I think just off the top of my head, Mitchel, I believe, Censis, about half of it now is in the SBIC subsidiary. So I think the existing loan we had was in the SBIC subsidiary; the new piece isn't. And then on Easy Ice, I believe -- and I could be stand corrected, but I believe of our debt, about half of it is also in the SBIC, may be a little more actually; the equity -- the preferred equity is not in SBIC.

Operator

Operator

And I am not showing any further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Christian.

Christian Oberbeck

Management

Well, thank you everyone for joining us today, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's presentation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.