Eagle Point Credit Company Inc.

Greetings and welcome to Ecopoint Credit Company's third quarter 2025 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I will turn the conference over to Mr. Darren Doherty from ProTech Partners. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Eagle Point Credit Company's earnings conference call for the third quarter of 2025. Speaking on the call today are Thomas Pajewski, Chief Executive Officer, and Ken Onorio, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that the matters discussed on this call include forward-looking statements or projected financial information that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from such projections. For further information on factors that could impact the company and the statements and projections contained herein, please refer to the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Each forward-looking statement or projection of financial information made during this call is based on the information available to us as of the date of this call. We disclaim any obligation to update our forward-looking statements unless required by law. Earlier today, we filed our third quarter 2025 financial statements and investor presentation with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These are also available in the investor relations section of the company's website, eaglepointcreditcompany.com. A replay of this call will also be made available later today. I will now turn the call over to Thomas Majewski, Chief Executive Officer of Eagle Point Credit Company. Tom?

Thomas Majewski, Chief Executive Officer of Eagle Point Credit Company Thanks, Darren, and good morning, everyone. We're glad you've joined the call today. We were very active in managing our portfolio during the quarter, both through deployment into new investments and rotation and optimization of portfolio investments already on the ground. We deployed almost $200 million into new investments, taking advantage of attractive opportunities in both the primary and secondary markets. The CLO equity investments that we made during the quarter had a weighted average effective yield of 16.9%. Additionally, during the quarter, we proactively completed 16 refinancings and 11 resets. which strengthened our CLO equity portfolio's earning power and helped partially offset the loan repricings that we faced throughout the year. Importantly, we still have a robust pipeline of additional resets and refinancings planned into 2026. Third quarter recurring cash flows came in at $77 million, or 59 cents per share. This is a decrease from $85 million, or 69 cents per share, in the second quarter. During the quarter, the company generated net investment income, less realized losses from investments of $0.16 per share, consisting of $0.24 of net investment income and offset by $0.08 of realized losses from sales on certain investments. The realized losses from investments were primarily driven by rotating some of our underperforming CLO equity positions. These marks were largely already reflected in NAV as unrealized mark-to-market losses and did not have a meaningful impact on our NAV. As of September 30th, our NAV stood at $7 per share, which is down 4.2% from $7.31 per share as of June 30th. For the third quarter, the company generated a gap return on equity of 1.6%. Our portfolio's weighted average remaining reinvestment period, or WARP, ended the quarter at 3.4 years, roughly 26% above the market average of 2.7 years. This is slightly higher than the 3.3 years as of June 30th and reflects our long-term strategy to seek to maximize our portfolio's WARP when the reset market is open. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we focused efforts during the quarter on portfolio rotation and optimization, which should ultimately enhance our cash flows and earning power going forward. Our position as a majority COO equity holder in most cases gives us multiple levers to pull to unlock value for the company over time. As many of you know, the loan market has been facing pressure from loan repricings in recent quarters. We did see repricing activity slow down when the credit markets were spooked recently by the idiosyncratic bankruptcy of First Brands. However, 42% of loans are trading above par again, and we may see repricing activity return. I'd also like to point out that ECC's exposure to First Brands was small, and the losses related to the name were well within our annual credit loss assumptions. In addition, We saw a pickup in LBO activity during September, which is healthy for the market overall and supportive of loan spreads. In other words, an increased supply of new issue loans should help mitigate spread compression pressure, which is ultimately a good thing for our cash flows and our NAV trajectory. During the quarter, we utilized our at-the-market program, selectively issuing $26 million of common stock at a premium to NAV. We also issued approximately $13 million of our 7% Series AA and AB convertible perpetual preferred stock as part of our continuous public offering. We believe this is a highly attractive cost of capital for the company and presents a real competitive advantage for us. We are unaware of any other publicly traded entity focused primarily on investing in CLO equity that has such an attractive program. During the quarter, we paid 42 cents per share in cash distribution to our common shareholders across three monthly distributions of 14 cents per share. Earlier today, we declared regular monthly distributions of 14 cents per share for the first quarter of 2026. The company's board of directors considers numerous factors when setting the monthly distribution level. including cash flow generated from the company's investment portfolio, gap earnings, and the company's requirement to distribute substantially all of its taxable income. Before I hand the call off to Ken, I'd like to highlight Eagle Point Income Company, which also trades on the New York Stock Exchange. It trades under the symbol EIC. That entity principally invests in junior CLO debt securities. We'll be hosting EIC's investor call today at 11.30 a.m. Eastern and invite you to join us for that call as well. Ken will now provide details on our financial results. After his remarks, I'll share additional insights on the loan and CLO markets broadly.

Thank you, Tom, and thanks, everyone, for joining our call today. For the third quarter of 2025, the company recorded net investment income less realized losses from investments of $21 million or $0.16 per share. Net investment income was $0.24 per share. This compares to NII less realized losses from investments of $0.16 per share in the last quarter and NII less realized losses of $0.23 per share in the third quarter of 2024. Additionally, for the third quarter of 2025, the company recorded losses from forward currency contracts of one penny per share. Including unrealized gains, the company recorded GAAP net income of $16 million or $0.12 per share for the quarter. This compares to a GAAP net income of $0.47 per share last quarter and $0.04 per share in the third quarter of 2024. The company's third quarter gap net income was comprised of investment income of $52 million and unrealized gains on investments and forward currency contracts of $4 million, partially offset by financing costs and operating expenses of $21 million, realized losses on investments of $10 million, distributions and amortization of costs on temporary equity of $6 million, and unrealized losses on certain liabilities held at fair value of $2 million and realized losses from forward currency contracts of $1 million. As a reminder, temporary equity refers to our multiple series of perpetual preferred stock. In addition, the company recorded an other comprehensive loss of $2.5 million for the third quarter. The company's asset coverage ratios as of September 30th for preferred stock and debt calculated pursuant to Investment Company Act requirements were 239 percent and 529 percent, respectively. These measures are above the statutory requirements of 200 percent and 300 percent. During the third quarter, we deployed nearly $200 million in gross capital into new investments. Our debt and preferred securities outstanding at quarter end totaled 42% of the company's total assets, less current liabilities, above our target range of 27.5% to 37.5% when operating the company under normal market conditions. Consistent with our long-range financing strategy for the company, all of our financing remains fixed rate and we have no maturities prior to April, 2028. In addition, a significant portion of our preferred stock financing is perpetual with no set maturity date. So far in the current quarter through October 31st, we've collected 70 million in recurring cash flows and expect additional collections throughout the balance of the quarter. Additionally, management's unaudited estimate of the company's NAV as of October month end, was between $6.69 and $6.79 per share. With that, I'll turn back to Tom for a look at market insights and closing thoughts.

Thanks, Ken. Stepping back to the market, loan fundamentals remain quite strong. The S&P UBS leveraged loan index returned 1.6% for the third quarter and has continued to perform well through October, returning 30 basis points for the month. There were five leveraged loan defaults during the third quarter, and as of September 30th, the trailing 12-month default rate stood at 1.5 percent. This is up from 1.1 percent as of June 30th, but well below the long-term average of 2.6 percent. The widely reported first brands default drove most of the increase in the default rate, though its impact on the broader CLO market was actually minimal. First Brands accounted for only 30 basis points of our portfolio on a look-through basis, and we do not view it as a widespread indication of credit weakness. While the First Brands loan itself was large, it's important to remember that a good portion of that loan was held in BDCs, not CLOs. Our portfolios looked through default exposure as of September 30th, stood at 34 basis points, which is well below the broader market levels. With rates expected to fall further, we believe defaults should remain muted as loan issuers will have lower interest costs. In addition, corporate fundamentals across the loan market remain quite resilient, with issuers generally continuing to grow revenue in EBITDA, despite the effects of inflation, tariffs, and movements in interest rates over the past years. During the quarter, the market saw approximately 6.8% of the leveraged loan market or roughly 27 percent annualized, prepaid at par. In general, loan issuers continue to be proactive in tackling their near-term maturities, and the maturity wall we have mentioned on prior calls continues to be pushed out. Unfortunately, while pushing out the maturity wall is good, many of these refinancings by borrowers have also included reducing the spread on loans, leading to the spread compression that we've talked about over the past few quarters. On the CLO side, the market saw $53 billion of volume during the quarter. This was up slightly from $51 billion during the last quarter. Reset and refinancing activity for the third quarter was $69 billion and $36 billion, respectively, and both of these measures represented significant increases on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Our portfolio metrics continue to stand out versus the markets. As of quarter end, CCC-rated exposures within our CLO equity portfolio stood at 4.6%, which is lower than the broader market average of 4.8%. Similarly, only 2.7% of the loans in our CLOs were trading below 80, and this compares to 3.4% across the market. Our weighted average junior OC cushion stood at 4.6%, well in excess of the market average of 3.7%. These are all important measures that underscore the quality of our CLO equity portfolio. And overall, we believe we have a higher quality portfolio than the market more broadly. The Fed's recent rate cuts have had limited direct impact on CLO equity as our returns are largely driven by spreads, not base rates. In many respects, lower rates can be constructive for the CLO equity asset class, easing interest costs for loan issuers. It also helps increase LBO activity that contributes to new loan supply and potentially wider loan spreads in the future. Looking ahead, we're excited about our near-term investment pipeline. Market conditions have continued to stabilize following the volatility earlier in this year, with loan fundamentals remaining resilient. If COO debt spreads remain flat or continue to tighten, We expect to take action on over 20% of our portfolio and unlock reset and refinancing upside in the coming months and quarters. To wrap up, we opportunistically deployed capital at attractive levels, executed resets and refinancings that strengthened the recurring cash flows in our portfolio, and maintained portfolio metrics that are favorable to the broader market. We are positioned with strong fundamentals, meaningful reinvestment optionality within our portfolio, and the flexibility to capitalize on opportunities as they arise. We thank you for your time and interest in Eagle Point Credit Company. Ken and I will now open the call to your questions. Operator?

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using a speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the start keys. And our first question will come from Gaurav Mehta with Alliance Global Partners.

Thank you. Good morning. I want to ask you on your comments around portfolio resets and refi. I think you mentioned over 20% of your portfolio. would be reset and refi. I want to get some more color on the timeline for that and what would the impact be.

Sure. Good morning. Thank you for your questions or your question.

As we laid out, we completed a ton of refis and resets during the third quarter, so very proactive with our portfolio. And when we talk about the our outlook for the future, we're anticipating another 20% of the portfolio makes sense to have some actions taken over the next one to two quarters, generically. It's all market conditions specific. The biggest thing I would draw your attention to in our investor deck is page 28, or 25 through 28 now, where we lay out position by position every single CLO that we have. and what the AAAs are. You'll see the weighted average AAA spread is 134 basis points over SOFR. Right now, generically, you should think of the market as 120 to 125. Some deals wider, some deals tighter. And then start looking through the deals that have the highest AAA spreads, and those are going to be the ones that we go after. It's a combination of triaging, and making an educated decision. It's as much of an art as a science of which CLOs will get the biggest potency for us, whether or not we're doing a refi or a reset, which ones have the most upside savings or the value in lengthening the reinvestment period. You can see over the course of the year, we've done, I think we're on pace for comfortably over 75 different corporate actions, so a highly, highly proactive ownership program. and I would expect that to continue, market conditions permitting. We may have even a few more slated for this year, and we'll kick off into next year. So I would expect a slow and, not slow, but a consistent reduction in AAA costs across the CLO portfolio and lengthening or lengthening of the reinvestment periods of those that were resetting. That said, it is all market dependent and There's been a period of time, if you look back to Q1, it was reset mania until March 1st. And then we put pencils down because the market didn't cooperate, proverbially. So there is always that market caveat. But we are working very hard and we'll do everything within reason to keep the cost lower on the right side of our balance sheet. And I would say no one in the market has done more than us, is my belief.

Thanks for that color. Second question I want to ask you on your near-term investment opportunities. Can you provide some color on what you guys are seeing in the primary and secondary markets for CLA equity?

Yeah, the market continues open and active right now. Primary market, we continue to see plenty of issuance opportunities. We have a number of loan accumulation facilities, which are kind of the precursor to creating CLOs. Some of those are ripe and ready to go into CLOs, whether or not we issue any more this year, a little bit market dependent. As I'm sure you're aware, insurance companies are big buyers of a lot of the rated tranches, and they often have annual budgets to deploy, and they have a funny habit of deploying that budget before the end of the year, so sometimes you see things back up a little bit in the last week or two. We may get one or two new done this year, but certainly a robust pipeline into Q1 of next year. And then on the secondary side, hundreds of millions of dollars of CLO equity trades every single week. The market's not cheap today by any stretch. The equity is not being given away. That said, there are still selective opportunities out there. We have both been buying and selling in the secondary market. One of the things we've made reference to recently In our remarks was some rebalancing and lightening on a handful of collateral managers and positions where perhaps we saw more risk than upside. That said, we've also been deploying in the secondary market in investments where we see more paths for upside. So market is open and active right now, and we are an active participant in every segment of it. But we do remain very selective in the areas where in the investments we're making.

Okay. Thank you. That's all I have. Great. Thank you very much.

And our next question comes from Mickey Schleen with Clear Street.

Good morning, Tom and Ken. I hope you're well. Tom, you mentioned the impact of first brands on loan spreads. Could you characterize how trends in sealed loan asset spreads in October and maybe even through mid-November relative to September?

Let's see.

So loan spread compression has slowed somewhat. If a few weeks doesn't make a trend. Unfortunately, I wish I could say better there. When we look across our portfolio, lots of people ask us about default rates and all that stuff. The number one thing that I don't like right now, and you've heard it from us in earnings here for a few quarters, is spread compression. And the weighted average spread on these loans is down I'm going to say circa 50 basis points, give or take, over the last year. That is not good. We're doing our part to tighten on the right side through our reset and proactive reset and refinancing program. An analogy I like to make to people, and this is an analogy, we've got well over 1,000 loans and a little over 100 CLOs. It's kind of picture a wall of sand coming at us on one side. That's the loans repricing, while our team is tossing boulders on the other side. So it's just things move at a different pace and sometimes a different activity. To your point, there's always a silver lining in clouds. And while First Brands is certainly not the credit market's finest moment, ironically, it was actually a repricing that they were working on that gave rise to figuring out the fraud. And the quality of earnings, my understanding of the quality of earnings report was getting prepared. And as part of that process, some of the things going on at the holdco above the borrower became known. So that has certainly put a chill on the repricing market. There are far fewer repricings right now than you'd expect with 40% of the loan market trading above par. Regrettably, I'll say it's too soon to declare a victory, though. and it wouldn't surprise me to see a little more pick back up, but it certainly has slowed since the first brand's news by a healthy margin.

Tom, you sort of segued into my next question, which is sort of the longer term out for spreads, loan spreads. When I look at page 19 of your presentation, you know, those spreads look like they're heading down to their long-term average, as you said, and, you know, we don't know for sure. Spreads, you know, can move up and down over long periods of time, but Over the long run, looking at the supply and demand of capital in the loan market, what is your outlook long-term for loan spreads?

That's a tough one. And we show two averages here. We show the 35-year average, give or take, and the 10-year average. Obviously, I like the 10-year average better than the 35-year average. What I will say when you think about the pre-2007 average, you know, in the old, old days, and our good friend Peter Gleistein might get, I might be slightly off on this. He might know better. The loans had two spreads, 250 and 275. Those are the two choices when you called the loan desk at Chemical or Manufacturers Hanover a long time ago. Obviously, the market's gotten a lot more sophisticated. when loan spreads were 250 back in 2006, and I remember as a CLO banker modeling 250, 240 spreads, that was back when AAAs were 25 and 30 basis points over. So the funding cost in the market was much, much lower. The loan market and CLO market, whether we like it or not, are inextricably linked. The CLO market owns about two-thirds of the loan market, maybe even a little more right now. So, while we are at the low on spreads over the last 10 years at 347, I'd love to call a bottom. I can't quite call a bottom there, but when I think about the long-term average going back to the early 1990s, that was influenced significantly by the availability of, in those days, LIBOR plus 25 AAAs when we're 100 basis points away from that. If I had to guess, we're closer to the bottom in the 10-year band than, well, certainly than the top. You get one or two other credit things pop up. You know, frankly, the way media cycles work, like I'll use an example, like our friends at, you know, Citibank for a while said, It felt like they could do nothing right. They had the mistake with the Revlon loan and that like $27 trillion wire, you know, just everything that went wrong, you know, kind of seemed to get attention. My sense is the credit markets are going to be that kind of get that focus from the media. There was some headline I saw in Bloomberg about a loan in a BlackRock BDC that took a big write-down. Again, it's probably one loan in a portfolio of hundreds, but it got attention. The good news around that is it probably helps abate loan spreads and potentially even a path for widening. One of the pieces we did share is that M&A activity does seem like it's picking up, which is good to the extent what's been going on is a lot of the same loans are just getting repriced and handed around and refinanced and repriced tighter to the extent we see new names coming into the market, which it feels like we are. With loan spreads lower, it makes M&A a little more easy. Could we see a little new supply, which would help? So can't call a bottom. I'd love to. We are at the 10-year low, if you look at this chart. Hopefully, that means there's some upside to go. Our focus from the media, the credit industry broadly, probably is a good fact, at least, again, on spread compression, odd as that sounds.

I appreciate that, Tom. It's pretty much in line with my thesis. A couple more questions, if I can. On page 24, you show that your recurring cash flows dipped below the total of the distribution and your operating expenses. So I'd like to understand what drove that decline. And could you also walk us through what factors the board considered when you look at that decline in keeping the dividend stable?

Yes. We have a prepared answer for the latter one, but to the first one, the principal thing, spread compression, was a non-trivial factor there. I'm going to say the weighted average spread fell at eight or so basis points this quarter. And while we're lowering our costs on the right side of the balance sheet with resets and refis, We didn't lower our weighted average eight basis points, unfortunately, quarter over quarter. So that's the principal manifestation of it. That said, there are, and we do say this often, but there seems to be, as I was looking through it the other day, a disproportionate number of investments that haven't yet made their first payments in the portfolio. So there is some green shoots. It's not as if everything is paying yet. And not that there's a problem with those investments, just a little bit of a delay in getting, when you make investments, sometimes it's six months before the cash flow turns on. So a little bit of that principal driver spread compression, a little bit offset by some reset activity that we do. But even the reset activity hurts cash flows in the first quarter because you've got to pay the bankers, the lawyers, the rating agencies, And that all comes out of your distribution in the quarter you do that. So in many cases, the equity distribution comes down for one period as a result of that activity. So those are some things going on there. In ECC, we did maintain the distribution at 14 cents a month for the first quarter. The board considers any number of factors, all factors regarding both the outlook for the company, the portfolio, the economy, taxable income are all drivers in there. Obviously, the board reviews these matters every single quarter. No one thing is a particular driver of the decision, but a collage of all the factors went into the board's decision.

I understand. One last question, Tom. You talked about borrowers taking advantage of tighter spreads and DLO managers and equity holders like yourselves also taking advantage of tighter spreads to refinance. But if I'm not mistaken, your most expensive liability, the Series F preferreds, will become callable soon. I might be wrong, but I think I'm right.

January comes to mind to me. Am I right on that, Ken? Yeah, Ken's smiling even when you say that, just to tip our hand.

Okay, so I'm right. Yeah, it's hard for me to keep track of all of them, but those are the most expensive. They're callable very soon. Under current conditions, does it make sense to refinance them? In other words, did Ken's smile just get broader?

And the banker's smile might have gotten as well. I'm not sure if they're listening, but As we look at the capital structure, and this is on page 10 of the deck, a very astute observation on your part. Interest rates have certainly come down a bunch. We're above our target leverage limit. Target leverage guidelines, I should say, that we say we want to run the company, and we're well within our statutory limits. And we talk about while we're doing it very slowly, Right now, because of where we are, we've got that 7% perpetual preferred program that we issue through Eagle Point Securities, the series AA, BB. I say this, this is a meaningful competitive advantage. No other principally CLO equity-oriented vehicle has such a program. I love that program. And could you see us opening up or doing something with EF? Obviously, the board will make the decisions on the appropriate days. But the call date is January 18th, 2026. And it wouldn't surprise me if Ken has a reminder in his calendar around that day.

Yeah, me neither. Okay. I appreciate it. That's it for me this morning. I appreciate you taking my questions.

Thanks so much, Mickey.

And we'll go next to Eric Zwick with Lucid Capital Markets. Hey, Eric. Good morning.

Good morning, Tommy. Hey, good morning, Tommy, Ken. So one or two, my first question, maybe just a bit of a follow-up on some of the broader topics you've been talking about. But in terms of, you've mentioned there's quite a bit of opportunity still for some of the borrowers, the assets out of the CLOs to refinance. You have opportunities remaining on the liability side. From quarter to quarter, one may outweigh the other, but over the long term, there's the changes should be offsetting, so to speak, and your arbitrage opportunity remains the same. Is that the right way to think about it?

Generically, yes. Over the long term, any given period, it widens or tightens. The days loans are widening are usually the days CLO debt is widening. That's kind of a bad fact. The good news is CLO debt is longer than loan debt. And we think these things move in cycles. Credit spreads tighten, credit spreads widen, back and forth. The good part about loans being shorter term than CLO debt is when things get choppy in the credit markets, if you look back historically, and we have the data going back to 2014 on our website, you'll see there's periods of time where the portfolio spread on the underlying loans increases and sometimes increases quite handsomely. the AAAs we're locking in today can be around for 12 years if we need them. So your statement is absolutely correct. When you look over the long term, these things have a nice habit of balancing out. And some of it is just due to the CLO market and loan market, again, are so intertwined. There are periods, and if you were to listen to our calls in 2018, I'm sure the recordings are gone, but the transcripts are still around. We might have lamented the same thing of spread compression beating us up. And then it went the other way, and we had the AAAs locked in place, and from January 2020 to the end of January 2021 was a great period, not a straight line, but a great destination. So over time, these things should all balance out. They rarely feel like they balance out on any given day.

Got it. That's helpful, and you kind of anticipated that the second part of the question there with your answer, so I won't... I won't go on there. Just in terms of funding activity going forward, it's certainly been a re-rating of not only your stock, but the other CLO funds that are traded out there, trading now at a discount to NAV. How does that change your thoughts about potentially shifting to a share buyback kind of strategy as opposed to using the ATM?

Yeah, and certainly... So we look at things over a long term. In the vast majority of the decade plus we've been public, the ECC, we've been fortunate, and investors have been demanding the stock such that it's traded at a handsome premium to NAV. Right now it has been at a discount, as I think have all of, or substantially, certainly all of the major CLO equity funds. It's a little bit frustrating why that is. It could be any number of reasons. The BDC index is down a bunch over the last kind of 60 days as well. You know, frankly, BDCs, in my opinion, are more levered to interest rates than we are in that they have floating rate loans where the floaters are falling. And they have fixed rate debt, which is going to have to be refinanced wider. So, you know, any number of things. And then overlay, you know, the credit index news in the world. It doesn't help matters. The impact on the major CLO equity funds ours including is frustrating. We do make long-term decisions about these things and our management style that Ken and I bring to the table as well as the advice and direction from our board, very much long-term focused. We won't make hair trigger decisions around any stuff. That said, I will say all things are up for consideration at the company and will continue to be. But we think about these things very much on a long-term basis.

And last one for me, just looking at the decline in NAV, curious if you could kind of frame how much of that is related to changes in kind of market pricing and spreads versus maybe return of capital, how much of that could potentially impact be recaptured if there are changes in the market.

Yeah, I don't have the exact split. I'll say the vast majority, we did have some realized losses from repositioning. By and large, those prices were already factored into the NAV, so that's more of just a reclassification from unrealized to realized, not our favorite, but not a big NAV impact. And then the NII was repositioned less than, you know, unfortunately, non-trivially less than the cash distributions paid. So I don't have the exact components, but I'm going to judgmentally say right now, and we can check the numbers later, the largest component of the NAV move in the quarter was the excess of distributions over NII. And Ken is nodding. Yes. Yes, I'm right, which is good. We're directly right. It was a myriad of factors that go in there. But the biggest factor, in my opinion, on the NAV move, frankly, was the distribution relative to NII.

And then I guess my follow-up to that would be in, I know Mickey kind of already asked about the dividend a little bit, but I guess maybe what levers or what would need to happen in the market or what can you do to potentially get the NII back above the dividend?

Yeah. All things are considered at all times. Continuing to rotate the portfolio into higher earning investments is something we've been doing a lot of. We haven't used the word rotation too much lately or in a while, but we have used it recently here in terms of working on a couple of positions that have not bad, but have underperformed our expectations. kind of re-rotating into things that we think have some higher earnings potential. I think Mickey was kind enough to suggest we call the Fs and maybe replacing 8% financing with 7% financing. That might have a nice ring to it. Obviously, we'll make the decision on that day based on market conditions and continuing to optimize every aspect of our portfolio. At the end of the day, the I'm just looking at some numbers here.

Bear with me one second.

So the things we, of a selection of things, we exited, had what looks like about an 11% effective yield, and this is the 20-plus percent effective yield on things that we were putting into the ground during the past quarter. So it's rotating out of some things that were, for whatever reason, either late in life. I'm looking at a 2015 vintage CLO. That's one of the largest sales. sales we had, one of the sales we had, not the largest necessarily, but looking at a nine and a half percent yield, but the weighted average effective yield on the things we sold was 11, and the weighted average of things that, of a handful of investments that were some of the kind of rotation offsets that a two-handle in front of them. So doing everything we can to get more earnings into the box is part of it. We can do that through resets and refis, as well as buying and selling CLO securities. We can also do it by optimizing the right side of our balance sheet. I am mindful of where we are on the leverage ratio. We're comfortably on sides with all the statutory limits, but we are operating outside our target band as well. We do like to be within the target band most of the time, so that's something in the equation. But, you know, it's very much a collage and very much things that we think about on a long-term basis. We don't, you know, while we do these calls every quarter, we think about where we want to be over multiple years, not just what are we going to say on the next quarterly call. Although we like to have good things on the next quarterly call, of course, not to dismiss it either. Of course.

Thanks for taking my question today.

Thank you very much, Eric. Very thoughtful questions.

And we'll go next to Christopher Nolan with Ladenburg Salmon.

Hey, Christopher. Hey, guys. How you doing? Tom, on your comments on the 12-month trailing default rate, I presume that's for industry companies. And is that First Brands at all? I know First Brands is small, but I'm trying to get an understanding why the trillion default rate starts creeping up the way it is.

Yeah, it picked up to, that's market-wide. It's not really, I mean, our default exposure is relatively low. That said, you know, CLO managers have a funny habit of selling things a day before they default to keep their optical default rates low as well. Yeah. There's any number of factors that go into that. The pickup in defaults, I think we said there were five defaults during the quarter. First Brands was a roughly $5 billion loan. So that's one of the biggest Ds we've had in a long time. So that's the principal driver on a quarter-over-quarter basis. The good news, at least for us, In the CLO market, a lot of that loan was held in BDCs, and it was not a CLO-only loan by any stretch. It was, I think, a SOFR plus 500 loan, which met the requirements to get into a lot of BDCs. So our exposure to it was quite low. You know, we model significant amount of reserves for losses. Obviously, we like not to use them, but this was well within our tolerable band that we know we're always going to have a few problems every year. So, for us, it was fine. But the overall pickup, which I think we're like 130 or something, 1.3% trailing 12 months, still well less than the long-term average. But, you know, if we were talking six months ago, I think that was a double-digit basis point number. So, trending up a bit, but driven by, you know, first brands at 50 basis points of a $1.5 trillion or $5 billion of a $1.5 trillion market, that one can move the percentage quite a bit.

And excuse the, what might be a dumb question, but in the case of fraud, like first, who's responsible for vetting that fraud before the CLOs packaged and sold?

Let's see. So an investment bank underwrote the loan and placed it. And then institutional money managers who manage the CLOs reviewed the loan and pushed by. And we review those institutional money managers to determine that they have, you know, processes, they have the right people in place and processes in place. So it's, you know, the, the chain is somewhere in there and auditors audit things and tell you what's going on. And, you know, that's, you know, that's kind of the, you know, the, the broad, you know, things that go on in a system like that. One of the interesting things about first brands, as best I'm aware, is a lot of the things that are raising questions for sure today, and if you read the headlines on the bankruptcy court docket, a lot of things going on were going on at a holding company above the operating company where this $5 billion senior secured loan was. Doesn't make it right or wrong. Obviously, it's still wrong what happened, but it seemed like there were money moving up and down from Holdco to Opco. Our loan at Opco is where that $5 billion loan was facing. The subsidiary of Holdco, it seems like they were getting advances from Holdco, as best I'm aware, based on factoring some receivables but it sounds like they may have been, you know, multiple factored. The company had something like a billion dollars of EBITDA a year ago. I might be slightly off on that, but directionally accurate, I believe. And, you know, on the surface, like, you know, the $5 billion of debt against $1 billion of EBITDA, that's not low, but that's not absurdly high either in the credit market. That said, and while they talk about brands and first brands, Things they made are generic aftermarket auto parts with limited exception. Do you know what brand windshield wipers you have on your car? It's not like you think about a J.Crew, which went bankrupt many years ago. J.Crew still exists. The brand is valuable. People, oh, I buy my stuff at J.Crew. My son likes to get his stuff there. He thinks he looks cool. A lot of the products, I think Fram is one of the brands, that first brand. Maybe some people have some loyalty to that for oil filters and things like that. But there's not a lot of... The biggest challenge that I see is a lot of those parts, while they're essential to the operation of your automobile, if you're a kind of person purchasing at an aftermarket shop... They're going to buy one versus the other. Who knows? And if these guys are not able to produce and get product to the stores, someone else will and they lose their shelf space. So when we look at the ultimate recovery on first brands, which is still quite uncertain, in my opinion, some CLOs still own it. We've got this dynamic of, OK, let's say they were at a billion of EBITDA a year ago. That doesn't mean they're going to be at a billion of EBITDA next year. I would certainly take the under on that. They did get some additional funding on their dip facility released, but it sounded like cash was extremely tight there for a while. So my sense is it probably continues in some way, shape, or form, but it's probably a much smaller company. The ultimate recovery for the creditors, the jury's still out. It doesn't look great, but not... But I think a lot of it will be how quickly they can get back into business. And if they're a $700 million EBITDA company versus a $300 million EBITDA company, and I'm just pulling those numbers out of the air, could be very, very different outcomes for the creditors that remain.

Great. That's great, Collar.

Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.

And we have time for one final question, and that will come from Timothy D'Agostino with B Reilly Securities.

Hey, Tim, how are you?

Good, how are you? Thanks for taking the question. Joining a little bit late here, so I apologize if I'm reiterating anything. But in the press release, you mentioned that your common stock issuance via your ATM was issued at a premium to NAV. I was just wondering if you could quantify how much accretion to NAV that created.

Okay, sure. It was a few pennies. I think we have it in the press release. I would say two to three cents accretion.

Okay, great. And then just another quick question. In the third quarter, you did 11 resets and 16 refinances. I was wondering if you could provide an update quarter to date of how many you've done for the fourth quarter?

I don't think we, um, we don't publish that number.

Um, and that sometimes it's episodic earlier versus late. We do give the cash flow collected because most of it comes in and out in the first month of the quarter. Um, we haven't published it, um, per se. Um, So if you wanted to figure it out, what I'd probably say, we do list every investment we have. If you look on Bloomberg, you can see which of those have been reset. I recognize that that would take a little bit of time. So we don't publish the stats around that just because at this midpoint in the, here we are exactly roughly at the midpoint of the quarter, it may not be indicative of the total volume. So I can assure you we've continued with them. And we will continue with them, but we don't share a mid-quarter stat on that.

Okay, great. Thank you so much. Yeah, those are the two quick ones from me. Thank you very much.

And this now concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Thomas Majewski for closing comments.

Great. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining the call today. We really appreciate your attention and, frankly, the very thoughtful questions from all the analysts. Ken and I are around for the balance of the day. If people have further questions, we're happy to continue the discussion. Thank you very much for your time and interest in Eagle Point Credit Company.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.