Great Elm Capital Corp.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Great Elm Capital Corp Second Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you have a question, please press the star and then the number one key on your touchtone telephone. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star then zero on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to a representative of the company.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Great Elm Capital Corp's second quarter earnings conference call. If you would like to be added to our distribution list, you can email investorrelations at greatelmcap.com, or you can sign up for alerts directly on our website at greatelmcc.com. In addition to our comments for today's call, we will be utilizing an investor presentation as an accompaniment. While we will not be referring directly to the slides, our comments today will generally follow the form and structure of the presentation. The slide presentation accompanying this morning's conference call and webcast can be found on our website under Financial Information, Quarterly Results. On the website, you can also find a copy of this presentation, our press release, Form 10-Q, and a link to the webcast. I would like to call your attention to the customary safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information. Also, please note that nothing in today's call constitutes an offer to sell or solicitation of offers to purchase our securities. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements and projections, and we ask that you refer to Great Elm Capital Corp's filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these projections. Great Elm Capital Corp does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law. To obtain copies of SEC filings, please visit Great Elm Capital Corp's website under Financial Information, SEC Filings, or visit the SEC's website. Hosting the call this morning is Peter Reed, Great Elm Capital Corp's President and Chief Executive Officer. As a reminder, this webcast is being recorded on Tuesday, August 3, 2021. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Peter. Please go ahead, Peter.

Thank you, Adam. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. On today's call, we have our COO, Adam Kleinman, our CFO, Kerry Davis, and our portfolio manager, Matt Kaplan. As is our usual practice, I will begin with an overview of GECC's investment performance during the quarter. Matt will discuss our portfolio, Kerry will discuss our capital position in greater detail, and then I'll return for closing remarks. This was a solid quarter. for Great Elm as we successfully deployed nearly $50 million of capital in over 25 investments at a weighted average yield of 9.3 percent, grew NII despite a higher than anticipated number of redemptions, and grew our investment portfolio to $209.4 million of fair market value, an 8 percent increase from $193.6 million at the end of March. A robust pipeline of investment opportunities in part due to our ownership position in and relationship with Prestige Capital, which is very confident going into the back half of 2021. We continue to actively pursue additional opportunities in the specially financed space. As previously discussed, in May we entered into a $25 million credit facility with Citi National Bank, and in June we issued $57.5 million of 5 and 7 eighths unsecured notes maturing in 2026. The note offering provided us with an incremental $24 million following the redemption of our 6.5% notes due in 2022. Overall, we were able to increase our liquidity at a lower cost of capital and extend our maturities, as well as increase the weighted average yield on our debt investments from the prior quarter to approximately 11.1%. Finally, our asset coverage ratio was 166.2% at the end of the quarter, we certainly feel like things are moving in the right direction. Let me take a quick moment to provide an overview of our financial position. At quarter end, GECC had total assets of 397.8 million, with 91.7 million of net asset value, or $3.90 per share. In terms of NAB, this is a slight increase from the $3.89 per share reported at March 31, 2021. We pay a regular quarterly cash dividend of 10 cents, which represents a yield of 10.3% on June 30 NAV. NII for the quarter was approximately $2.1 million, or 9 cents per share, as compared to NII of $1.5 million, or 6 cents per share, for the quarter ending March 31, 2021. The improvement in NII was largely due to a strong quarter of deployments leading to a 17% increase in average invested assets. While Avanti remains our largest position, it is now a significantly lower percentage of the portfolio at fair value as compared to the same period in the prior year. So we are getting to a point where Avanti's impact on our overall book is lessening. We have now deployed over $108 million in new investments in the first half of 2021, working towards building an increasingly diversified investment portfolio as we seek to rotate the portfolio into what we believe to be higher quality credits. Our investment in relationship with our factoring business, Prestige Capital, continues to help drive new business activity. Throughout Q2 2021 and subsequent to quarter end, we actively deployed approximately $53.6 million of available cash into new investments at a weighted average current yield of 9.6%. The management of Prestige has done an exceptional job of sourcing new investment opportunities for the business and for Great Elm as we have continued to provide capital to Prestige to allow it to pursue larger transactions. This has allowed us to deploy capital into proprietary investments at greater spreads during a tightening margin environment. It's been an excellent relationship and we are very pleased with the results thus far in 2021. This point I'd like to turn the call to Matt to discuss our portfolio performance for the quarter.