PROFILE

If Oxford Square was a cat, the BDC would be on its third life. After starting off as TICC Capital in 2003 as a technology lender and failing miserably just before the Great Recession; OXSQ took a hard right and began investing in CLO equity at just the right time, when everyone else was leaving the building. Then in 2015, the manager sought to sell off the investment advisory contract to another asset manager and ignited a firestorm that lasted till September 2016 when dissident shareholders failed to wrest the advisory contract away from the managers, but spiked the original sale. Management then doubled down on its CLO-centric investment strategy, only months after claiming the approach was not appropriate within a BDC wrapper. In 2018, even the name was changed- TICC was out and Oxford Square was in – eerily similar to its sister public closed end fund, which is 100% CLO focused, Oxford Lane Capital. Along the way, management appears to have lost analyst coverage, and Conference Calls tend to be defensive affairs. Instead OXSQ appears to be reaching out to the individual investor market, most recently switching to monthly distributions – popular with the retail crowd. Net asset value has also been lost over the years: more than half of par capital written down or written off. NAV Per Share has dropped three quarters in a row. That’s the price investors pay for the high current yields thrown off by CLO equity stakes. GAAP earnings run below the $0.80 annual distribution and have since the pay-out was cut back in 2016. Adopting the higher leverage levels allowed by the Small Business Credit Availability Act might help OXSQ dodge the prospect of cutting its dividend in the short run, but that greater portfolio and higher debt could result in even greater losses down the road as CLO price volatility remains very high – as a vehicle leveraged 10x-14x should be. Admittedly, this management team knows the CLO market inside and out, but is CLO-investing the square peg in the BDC format round hole ? All these years after the BDC made that hard right, the jury is still out.