Ellington Credit Company

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ellington Credit Company Fiscal Quarter, ended June 30th, 2025, results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. At any time if your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star zero. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Aladin Shalai, Associate General Counsel. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not historical in nature and involve risks and uncertainties detailed in our registration statement on Form N2. Actual results may differ materially from these statements, so they should not be considered to be predictions of future events. The company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Joining me today are Larry Penn, Chief Executive Officer of Alatin Credit Company, Greg Bornstein, Portfolio Manager, and Chris Murnauf, Chief Financial Officer. Our earnings conference call presentation is available on our website, ellingtoncredit.com. Today's call will track that presentation, and all statements and references to figures are qualified by the important notice and end notes at the back of the presentation. With that, I'll turn it over to Larry.

Thanks, Aladin, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate your time and interest in Ellington Credit Company. Please turn to slide three. Ellington Credit had an excellent quarter, which technically was the first fiscal quarter of our new fiscal year. In this, our first full quarter as a registered closed-end fund, we generated an annualized economic return of nearly 20% net and grew NAV per share. Our strong results were driven by excellent performance across both CLO equity and mezzanine investments, as well as by the timely redeployment of capital following the April sale of our legacy mortgage-related holdings. Thanks to excellent execution by Mark Tkotsky and his team, we successfully completed the disposition of our remaining mortgage-related investments with minimal NAV impact, and then proceeded to grow our CLO portfolio by 27% quarter over quarter to $317 million, as shown on slide three. Please turn now to slide four. Market conditions were wide-ranging in calendar Q2. Following the surprise tariff announcements on April 2nd, heightened macroeconomic uncertainty led to sharply lower prices across the board on risk assets. However, after the April 9th tariff pause, risk sentiment rebounded quickly, sparking a broad market rally. By quarter end, both volatility and credit spreads had fully retraced their earlier upsurges, and many equity indices reached their all-time highs. As you can see on this slide, credit spreads on both US corporate high-yield and investment-grade bonds tightened overall on the quarter, with May and June's recovery more than offsetting April's weakness. Turning to the specific sector that we focus on, namely CLOs, you can see on the top of the page that CLO mezzanine tranches, especially triple-B rated tranches, also performed well on the quarter, although not quite as well as high-yield corporates. CLO equity also generally performed quite well. As also shown in this slide, CLO issuance remained high by historical standards, but was lower than in recent quarters, reflecting the impact of all that intra-quarter volatility. At EARN, having sold all our remaining agency pools in early April, our timing was fortunate given the contemporaneous risk-off price action, and so we moved quickly to begin redeploying that freed-up capital into CLO investments. While our quickness allowed us to add CLOs at their 2025 lows in April, we also continued to deploy capital into compelling CLO investments throughout the remainder of the quarter. As I noted previously, CLOs didn't actually end up recovering quite as much as high-yield corporate bonds did, and that was a good thing for us given that we still had more capital to put to work. The key driver of our excellent performance this quarter was strong net investment income from both our CLO equity and CLO mezzanine positions, complemented by opportunistic trading, the redemption at par of two mezzanine positions that we had bought at discounts to par, and the successful reset of a CLO in which we hold equity, all of which contributed to the growth in our NAV per share. We still have ample dry powder today, and putting that to work should boost our net investment income in the coming months. At our current rate of deployment, we project that starting with September, our monthly net investment income will cover our eight-cent monthly distribution. At that point, we'll consider ourselves to be close to fully invested. With our Closed End Fund conversion now behind us, we are now benefiting from all the enhancements that the Closed End Fund structure brings us, including the tax efficiency of pass-through RIC taxation and the ability to focus fully on CLO investments. I am confident that our new structure and strategy will support earnings growth and help us capitalize on the compelling opportunities we continue to see in the CLO market. I'll turn it over to Chris now to walk through some more of the financial details.