As if the BDC Reporter was not already omnipresent in readers inboxes, now we’re available on video and on podcasts ! Just before our recent medically-necessitated hiatus, the BDC Reporter attended the Active Investment Company Alliance’s (AICA) kick off conference in Manhattan. We were featured on a panel about the BDC sector.This led to much new media being created, which we’re now sharing with our readers.

Video-Ing

John Cole Scott, the Founder of the AICA, organized for various speakers to be individually interviewed by “video anchor” Gregg Greenberg .   The BDC Reporter (i.e. editor and publisher Nicholas Marshi, also referred to as Nick) answered a few questions about the state of the BDC sector after a very good year. Here is the video interview in question for anyone interested. We break no new ground because the format and the short amount of time involved and is mostly interesting for being the first time we’ve been interviewed on camera. Please remember that when judging our performance…

Panelling

For a more in-depth discussion of current BDC issues, check out the BDC panel that occurred shortly after the solo interview. There is both a video of the event and a transcript available. The panel was moderated by the highly polished Harry Pangas, a partner at the law firm of Dechert LLP out of Washington D.C. He has more than 20 years experience where BDCs and closed-end funds are concerned and posed some very insightful and useful questions for the panelists to chew on.

On the panel itself was the afore mentioned John Cole Scott, whose for-profit work is heading Closed-End Fund Advisors, and whose data we’ve frequently referenced on these pages; as well as Bryce Rowe, whose taken over covering BDCs at National Securities since Chris Testa went off to manage money for The Royce Funds.

Also participating was Kelly Thompson, founder of Direct Lending Deals – which we’ve also mentioned previously – a publication that provides all the hard-to-find-elsewhere details about new leveraged loan deals.

Podcasting

Wait ! There’s more !

At the conference, we were introduced to Chuck Jaffe who hosts the Navigator, a financial podcast which covers all sorts of subjects for the AICA.

On November 22, Chuck interviewed the BDC Reporter by phone about what to expect from the BDC sector in the year ahead.

Here’s a link to the podcast, which is just a few minutes long. and includes a transcript, so you can listen and read along at the same time…

Here are some of the gems from the BDC Reporter:

Views You Can Use ?

“Like with anything else, there are better BDCs and worse BDCs”

“There are forty-six public BDCs, and there’s also forty-five publicly traded BDC debt issues. And so between those two sets of securities, you’ve got a lot of choice”.

“Generally speaking, BDCs have been holding their dividends very nicely, even though LIBOR has been dropping, as you know for some time, and that’s sort of eroded investment income. But that they’re making up that investment income by adding assets in many places, or selling equity stakes in companies in some cases”.

“One of the things that makes BDCs unique, compared to many other kinds of closed-end funds or many other kinds of lenders, is that they’re limited as to how much debt they can take on. Which gives investors in them some confidence that they’re not going to go crazy and leverage themselves up in a way a bank does, ten or fourteen times their equity. So the government’s allowed them to double their leverage from a low base, to let’s say, a medium base. And in the last year and a half, the BDCs mostly had been taking advantage of that”.

” thank goodness BDCs live in their own little universe.”

“[BDCs are] managed in almost every case by some of the cleverest, most sophisticated groups on the street”

“we expect in 2020, that the dividends will be about as stable as they’ve been. Partly because the BDCs have all these levers to pull in terms of growing their assets, which allows them to grow their income, which allows them to offset any income that they’re losing from LIBOR or from the credit losses”.

For regular readers of the BDC Reporter, there may or may not be any content in these three inter-actions that are particularly ground breaking or market moving given that we’re addressing a generalist audience. Nonetheless, there may be kernels of interest in what we or others featured here have said.