Good morning and welcome to the Regal Investment Fund Investor Update. My name is Charlie Aitken, Investment Director, Regal Partners, and I will be hosting today's RF1 webinar. I'd like to refer you to the disclaimer, but particularly the information in this webinar has been prepared for general information purposes only and without taking into account any recipient's investment objectives, financial situation, or particular circumstances. The information does not, and does not intend to, contain a recommendation or statement of opinion intended to be investment advice. Our speakers today are Phil King, founder and CIO of Long/Short Equities for Regal Funds; Jessica Farr-Jones, portfolio manager, Emerging Companies, Regal Funds; and Gavin George, portfolio manager, Private Credit, Regal Funds. The Regal Investment Fund has been established to provide investors with exposure to a diversified selection of alternative investment strategies managed by Regal.
It has recommended ratings from both Zenith and IIR. Regal Partners RPL is an AUD 850 million market cap ASX-listed specialist alternative asset manager with over AUD 11 billion in assets under management. The group manages a broad range of investment strategies covering long/short equities, private markets, real and natural assets, credit and royalties on behalf of institutions, family offices, charitable groups, and private investors. We have over 70 investment professionals spread across offices in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America. RF1 gives investors access to all the strengths of Regal Partners in a single fund listed on the ASX. RF1 is a diversified portfolio of our best-performing alternative investment strategies. It is designed to deliver superior investment returns with limited correlation to equity markets and lower volatility. RF1 diversification has increased over the last five years, increasing our allocations to uncorrelated investment strategies.
Equity allocations have dropped from 85% in 2020 to 50% today. RF1 is the only multi-strategy alternative investment fund listed on the ASX and available for retail investors to own. RF1 performance since inception has been very strong, delivering a total return of 120% versus the ASX 300 total return of 40%. It's worth reminding our investors that RF1 has paid AUD 1.98 per unit in distributions since inception. I'm now going to hand over to Phil King, co-founder and CIO of Long/Short Equities, Regal Funds Management, for a market update and how RF1 is positioned.
Thanks, Charlie, and thanks everyone for your time today. It certainly has been a great run, with the US S&P 500 up over 30% in the last 12 months and the Aussie market up around 10% in the same period, and with both markets hitting all-time highs recently. This obviously begs the question, has the market run too hard? But we don't think so, and even though it won't go up in a straight line, we do think both markets will be higher by year-end. The main risk, in our view, is rising bond yields, and as long as yields stay flat or fall, the market should do well. We say this because we see enough value opportunities both within the Magnificent Seven and across the broader market.
We think there are some early signs that the growth of passive investing is making markets less efficient, and we think these signs are that this signals that the tide is possibly turning in favor of active management. There are some early signs that the S&P 500 is starting to outperform the NASDAQ, small caps are starting to outperform large caps, and that's very encouraging for active managers. With our funds having a strong start to the year, we think it's an exciting time to be investing. The run in the S&P 500 is quite extraordinary, and we think there are three common pushbacks on why this won't continue: the market's expensive, the market's run too hard, and the U.S. market has too much concentration.
Firstly, in terms of valuation, we think looking at an average P/E in the market can be very misleading, and we think that the disparity in valuations at the moment is a lot greater than it has been, as we'll discuss. We see great opportunities to be long certain stocks and short others. In regards to the market running too hard, the most common mistake in investing is selling and buying too early, and that is why momentum is such a powerful factor in markets. People usually sell too quickly, and we think there's a danger of that happening at the moment. Then finally, some people claim that there's excessive concentration in the U.S., and that's a problem. I'll actually say the opposite.
We think if the U.S. market is concentrated in great stocks, that could be a reason it can keep running, but we don't think the concentration in the U.S. at the moment is excessive. The Magnificent Seven represent about 30% of the S&P 500. This is certainly up on the historical levels, but it's well below most overseas markets around the world. Australia, for example, has around 40% of its market cap in its top seven stocks, so we don't think that the concentration in the U.S. is necessarily a reason for the U.S. market to be thought to be expensive. Obviously, the big drive in the U.S. market has been the performance of the Magnificent Seven, which have almost doubled over the last 15 months.
The encouraging thing is that the rally is now broadening and returns are spreading, and we think that's a very, very positive sign that the market rally can continue. Even though the Magnificent Seven have performed well over the last few years, as a group, they've not been getting more expensive because they have been delivering. Earnings growth has been more than matching the share price growth, so as a result, the Magnificent Seven as a whole have derated over recent periods, whereas the broader market has been fairly flat for an extended period but has got more expensive just in the last few months. The Magnificent Seven, on average, trade at a P/E of 29 times, whereas the rest of the market trades at a P/E of 19 times. Even within the Magnificent Seven, we think there are great opportunities for stock pickers.
In our Global Strategy, we're short Tesla, which, despite a falling share price, has become more expensive over recent years as earnings have disappointed and have fallen faster than the share price. In fact, earnings have stopped rising, our competition is increasing, and we're very happy to be short. NVIDIA has had a tremendous run, and I think many top-down investors have made a lot of money chasing the AI thematic, but NVIDIA, I think, is a very tough stock at the moment for bottom-up investors until we get some more clarity around what earnings are going to do in the next few years. We don't see any other obvious shorts across the Magnificent Seven outside of Tesla, and in fact, we're currently long three in our Global Strategy. We own three that we think are great businesses, have great balance sheets, and great valuations.
Alphabet trades on a P/E of about 18x next year, Amazon's on 33x, and Meta's on 21x, and all three of these companies have around $100 billion in cash on their balance sheets, and they're investing a lot in loss-making businesses that's currently depressing earnings, so we think the valuations on these three stocks are very, very attractive. In terms of the economic outlook, we think things have got a lot better over the last year or so.
The expected recession that many people were forecasting has not materialized, and we have no great clarity whether we're going to have a soft landing or how soft the landing will be if there is one at all, but it's certainly fair to say that the economic outlook has got a lot better over recent periods, which means that going forward, investors will start to look forward to earnings growth, whereas previously they've been looking forward to a recession. Short-term interest rates and central bank rate cuts get a lot of attention, but we think it's bond yields that really drive markets. U.S. and global markets had a huge bear market in the first 10 months of 2022 when U.S. 10-year yields went up almost 250 basis points.
This was even more dramatic for tech stocks, with the NASDAQ down 36% in this period and with many other tech stocks down a lot more. Then when yields stopped going up in 2022, it's important to note that they didn't necessarily go down. They just stopped going up, and this relieved pressure on markets, and as a result, equities had a strong rally. Then in the September quarter of last year, yields rose again over 100 basis points, and this again put pressure on equity markets. Then once yields stopped going up, markets had a very, very strong rally. We think as long as yields don't go up from these levels, we think the outlook for equity markets is very, very positive. Turning to Australia, we think there are lots of opportunities for stock picking. One of our preferred exposures remains resources.
Not only are resources trading on a very low multiple compared to their historical levels, but we think the top-down outlook for resources has been better than it has been for many, many decades. The supply constraints on the resource side are very great and getting stronger, with it getting harder and harder to get all the necessary approvals as political pressure grows on mining projects. We very much still like resources, whereas on the other hand, bank valuations in Australia have hit record levels, with CBA, for example, trading at around 20 times, which is despite, in our view, a very muted outlook for its earnings over the next 5-10 years. We certainly think it's a great time to be switching from banks into resources in Australia.
One of the interesting things that we're seeing in reporting periods at the moment is just a real increase in volatility, and we think part of the explanation for this is markets are becoming more inefficient with the huge increase in passive investing. What we saw in the February reporting period was almost the greatest number of stocks moving up or down more than 10%, and that's very exciting for active investors because it creates a real opportunity for us to add alpha by getting our stock picks right. It's going to be interesting to see how this develops. I think it's a case of inefficiencies increasing in the market, but also just being aware of how markets and how investors are positioned ahead of results. Look, that's something that's very exciting and a great opportunity for active investors like Regal.
We expect it's going to be another big year for M&A in Australia. We've seen a number of stocks in our portfolios receive takeover bids recently, and we think that's going to continue, with most of the interest coming from corporate buyers looking to consolidate the sector and also take advantage of an Australian dollar that's still trading in the 60s. There are a few glimmers of life in the IPO market, with one or two deals coming to market, but we think it's very much going to be very, very selective and limited. We think that only the high-quality deals will come through.
Part of the reason we think is just because the valuations we're seeing in the listed market are so much more attractive than what we're seeing in the unlisted market, and that arbitrage that we saw 5 or 6 years ago when we could buy unlisted valuations and see them list is not as great as it used to be and is not as widespread. There are certainly great opportunities for some of our unlisted exposures, as Jess will highlight shortly, and we also think there are some wonderful opportunities in the listed microcap market, as Jess will talk about now. Thanks, Jess.
Thanks, Phil. As a recap on the Emerging Companies Strategy, we're effectively a crossover fund that seeks to combine elements of private equity and hedge fund investing to offer exposure to both listed and unlisted opportunities in the next generation of leading companies. We launched the strategy about 8 years ago in 2016, which makes us the largest and longest-tenured player in the space in Australia, with access to very deep and high-quality proprietary deal flow. We're looking to invest in great companies with attributes such as excellent founders or CEOs, rapid growth profiles, attractive and highly profitable unit economics, large addressable markets, and exciting or novel business models or technologies, with market-leading or highly competitive products capable of displacing incumbents. We're sector-agnostic, and our investments fall into 3 broad categories that you can see on this page. First is listed microcaps.
They're usually listed on the ASX and typically have market caps sub AUD 300 million. We often invest via IPOs, placements, and block trades. Second is pre-IPO investments. These are private companies which are usually seeking to raise capital prior to an IPO within a year or so. We often get to invest via attractive structures such as convertible notes, which offer downside protection as well as equity-like upside. The final bucket is what we call expansion capital. These are also private companies, but they're often slightly earlier stage than a typical pre-IPO investment, with a longer-term pathway to a liquidity event. Nevertheless, we usually think these opportunities are compelling and act like call options for us around leading their future pre-IPO or IPO capital raising. The market over the past four years has generally performed in line with historical trends.
This is where we tend to see micro and small-cap stocks materially outperform large-caps during bull markets and underperform during bear markets. This reflects the cyclicality associated with their higher risk-reward profile. For example, after the COVID drawdown in 2020, we saw the Emerging Companies Index soar 271% from trough to peak, compared to 97% for the Small Companies Index and 68% for the ASX 200. Naturally, micro and small-caps were disproportionately hit relative to mid and large-caps in the 2022-2023 bear market, experiencing a materially larger drawdown and only bottoming in October last year versus June 2022 for the ASX 200. Microcaps and small-caps are still down 25% and 15% from their peaks, respectively, whereas the ASX 200 recently made new all-time highs, which we believe is a leading indicator for the smaller part of the market.
The material underperformance of small-caps relative to large-caps in the recent bear market is again exemplified on this slide, which shows a greater than 18% delta in performance between the Small Ordinaries and the ASX 100 since mid-2021. Overall, we believe that it is inevitable that this disconnect in the recent performance will normalize, as this rally broadens and continues, so we're excited about the likely outperformance of smaller microcaps going forward like we saw in the last bull market. This slide shows the 10-year historical price-earnings-to-growth or PEG ratio for the small-cap index. A PEG ratio reflects a company's price-to-earnings ratio divided by its growth rate. Therefore, a higher growth rate denominator will cause the overall ratio to be lower.
As you can see, despite the 19% rally in the small-cap index from the lows in October 2023, the PEG ratio for the index is around 1x, which is below the 10-year average. This implies the current valuations are relatively cheap versus historical levels when factoring in the current earnings growth rates on offer by small-cap companies, which is another bullish indicator that the recent rally can be sustained. In our Emerging Companies and small-cap funds, we do a lot of fundamental research to try to get exposure to excellent companies and, where possible, global market leaders in their earlier stages before they become mid or large-cap companies. I'll now briefly run through three examples of listed companies that are owned in both our Emerging Companies and small-cap funds, which we believe are global market leaders and can continue their strong recent share price outperformance.
DUG Technology is an example of a founder-led company that the Emerging Companies Strategy invested in pre-IPO and continues to own today. It owns and operates multiple high-performance computing data centers across Australia, the U.S., London, and Asia, servicing end markets such as oil and gas seismic processing, national security, space, and enterprise research projects. While it's not the largest player globally today in these fields, we believe their proprietary patented seismic imaging software and immersion cooling technology is the best in the world and will enable them to take material market share away from incumbents over the coming years. Trading at only 8x FY25 EBITDA, we believe this opportunity continues to be underappreciated by the market. Gentrack on the right is another example of a company owned in the Emerging Companies and small-cap funds that we believe is rapidly becoming a global market leader.
Gentrack offers mission-critical billing and CRM software that powers blue-chip energy companies across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and increasingly across EMEA and Asia. It grew annual recurring revenue by 51% last year, and we believe this strong trajectory can continue as renewable and electrification trends force end customers to upgrade their software, suggesting there is a long runway for Gentrack to continue taking market share away from incumbents such as SAP and Oracle. We believe its current multiple of 24x FY2025 EBITDA is undemanding, particularly given its strong pricing power, almost zero churn, and tendency to consistently upgrade and beat guidance. Life360 is another example of a founder-led company that the Emerging Companies Strategy invested in pre-IPO and continues to own today.
It is also a high-conviction position in our small-cap strategy and has been a big winner for the fund, with a share price up 142% over the past 12 months. Life360 is a global market leader in promoting family safety via what is the 15th most used app in the U.S., alongside names like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, with over 61 million monthly active users. We remain very bullish on the outlook for Life360, given how many growth levers it has at its disposal to continue its rapid organic growth trajectory. In particular, we think the opportunity to monetize its enormous freemium user base for the first time this year through in-app advertising will be transformative, as well as the ability to continue growing subscription revenues strongly through international expansion of its materially higher-priced membership offering.
At 24 times FY 2025 adjusted EBITDA, we believe there is ample valuation support for 360's re-rating to continue. Finally, I'll touch on two unlisted exposures in our Emerging Companies ' funds that we're particularly excited about. These are Firmus and ATI Global. Firmus is at the forefront of the current generative AI boom, deploying sustainable AI compute platforms across data centers in Southeast Asia with its JV partner, STT GDC, which is APAC's largest and fastest-growing data center operator. Firmus's JV was recently elevated to elite status within NVIDIA's cloud partner program and is on track to build Southeast Asia's largest GPU infrastructure as a service offering of high-performance AI clusters for energy-efficient computing. It is on track to be run-rating at $hundreds of millions in EBITDA by the end of the year. ATI Global is a founder-led global market leader in the legal technology space.
Its market-leading legal practice management software business, LEAP Legal Software, and legal search litigation workflow portal, InfoTrack, have dominant market share positions in ANZ but an enormous opportunity to grow their market share outside Australia in markets such as the UK, Ireland, and North America. It's at the forefront of innovation, constantly releasing incremental modules and offerings to ensure it remains the market-leading software solution for managing and automating a law firm's operations. It continues to grow rapidly at material scale, with over $1 billion of annual revenue and very high earnings margins. Now I'll hand over to Gavin to discuss the opportunities in private credit.
Thanks, Jess. I thought I'd start today by having a chat about the current overweight that we have in the portfolio and the private credit portfolio as it pertains to structured credit. Let me just take a quick step back here. The predominant theme that's driving really the whole role of private credit globally and more recently in Australia is the gradual tightening of the regulatory capital requirements and the prudential standards that the banking sector's subject to. Now, that's pushed loans historically that have been provided by the banking sector into other markets. The example of this that most people are maybe familiar with in the Aussie context is real estate credit. There's another, however, large, if not larger, less homogenous asset class that was traditionally provided by the banking sector that's now being funded outside of it. That's what I'll refer to as asset-backed credit.
Think of residential mortgages, auto loans, equipment loans, residential bridge loans, that kind of stuff. There's a very broad church of non-bank lenders that have been set up to provide these loans to consumers and SMEs predominantly. Now, these lenders, they can't fund those loans themselves by using deposits because they're not banks. As a result, they're reliant on alternative sources of funding to make these loans. That's where we step in. We step in to provide some of that funding. Now, we've taken comfort from several things when we're providing this capital. Firstly, some of these non-banks have been doing it for a while now, upwards of sort of 10 years. There's a strong cohort of well-capitalised non-bank lenders that we can lend to.
Now, in many cases, these operators are carved out of the banks themselves, and so they're writing very similar loans with similar risk metrics to what was previously within the banking sector. While these non-banks aren't regulated by APRA, they are subject to responsible lending rules of ASIC, and in some, but not all cases, like I said, have a very long track record of low losses. We've decided to go overweight in providing capital to who we feel are the leading operators in this sector. We've done that over the last 12 or 15 months. Now, we did it at a time when interest rates were rising. Some of the incumbent funders were reducing their risk to this sector, and these are mainly offshore funds. But underlying asset performance, that is, of the mortgages and the auto loans themselves, remained extremely sound.
That was in part due to the status of almost full employment here in Australia. From our perspective, it was a classic situation of market technicals diverging from fundamentals, and it allowed us to create this portfolio that's on this slide here of high-quality loans that are generating a yield of about 700 basis points. That's an all-in return of about 11% or 11.5%. Now, this decision to go overweight was opportunistic. Since then, spreads have dramatically tightened because credit markets have participated in the material risk rally that we've seen in most risk classes over the last three or four months. If we had to recreate this portfolio today, we'd probably be getting 100 or 200 basis points less.
We expect our allocation to this part of the Aussie private credit market to reduce over time, but the experience has sort of highlighted to us that there's a structural need for this kind of capital, this kind of capital that we're providing, and the market's sort of continuing to grow at about 10%. For a variety of reasons, we expect that this will remain a core part of the portfolio in the Private Credit Opportunities Fund through the cycle. I might just flick to the second slide that I'll speak to here, which speaks to some of the themes and observations in the private credit market. I'll just touch on one here, and I'll touch on an observation that Jess made. Micro caps and small caps, they're down about 25%, 15% respectively from their 2021 peaks.
Now, many of these companies, these listed companies, have credible growth opportunities which require funding. We're finding in some of these cases that shareholders feel that their equity's undervalued. They're very sensitive to dilution, to raising common equity to fund that growth, and that's especially the case where shareholders are insiders or founders. Now, these businesses quite often don't have any debt, so there's an opportunity for us to come on in and provide a modest amount of leverage that can be accretive to all the stakeholders of the business. We're providing secured, downside-protected debt, and we're getting warrants in some cases to participate in the upside, albeit at a much lower level of dilution than if they had gone and raised equity. A couple of quick examples here.
These opportunities have been coming in via the internal network of relationships that Regal has, by virtue of having been a longstanding provider of equity and pre-IPO capital to the Aussie mid-market. We've closed a couple of these loans in the last few months. One is to a business called Bigtincan. That's an enterprise software business that used our capital to invest in AI, and another to FSG, a telecoms operator who used our capital to build out a network of telecom assets in regional Australia. In both cases, we're getting paid 12% coupon, paid monthly, in addition to warrants for 3%-5% of the business. That's where we've been spending our time since we last spoke, and now I'll hand it back to Charlie.
Thanks, Gavin. We now move to the Q&A section of the webinar. If you'd like to submit a question, please use the side menu of the webcast player. We already have a number of questions, and if we don't get to your question today, the Regal Investment Relations team will contact you directly with a response via email. We might kick it off. Phil, I think we've got a couple for you here to start it. The first one is, does the rise of passive investing provide opportunities for active investors?
That's a great question. We mentioned that we're seeing increasing inefficiencies in the market, and we think that one of the major causes is the huge rise in passive investing. Passive investing works well if there are a lot of active managers in the market making markets efficient. Passive investors can then get a free ride, but if there's not enough active investors, passive investors can be in danger of getting sucked into a bubble, and we think that's what's happening now. A lot of things in finance move in cycles, and we think the active versus passive investing debate is one of those issues. At the moment, a lot of money is in passive, and that continues to grow. That means that things are getting easier and easier for active investors, so we think now it's a great time to be an active investor.
Very good. The next one's topical, Phil. Is Regal still a believer in Cettire?
Yeah, we are, Charlie. We first bought Cettire in the IPO at AUD 0.50. We've added to it at various times over the last few years, and now with the share price around AUD 4, it's been a huge winner for us. With the business growing strongly and with the business about to launch into the world's largest luxury goods market, China, and with the collapse of the largest competitor, Farfetch, we think there's a lot more upside to come. People have been throwing mud at Cettire since it listed. I don't know whether it's an Australian thing, but certainly a lot of people have been throwing mud at it, and not much of it has stuck, but a recent AFR article certainly caused the stock to come off its highs.
The allegations of negative reviews, founder sell-downs, incorrect duty getting paid have all been around for a few years, but they got some traction in this press article. We've done 11 expert calls and investigated these claims, and we're still very happy to be long Cettire, and we've used the recent weakness to add to our position. In respect to the negative reviews, we think this is common for online retailers, and we actually detect a slight improvement in the number of negative reviews recently. In respect to the duty, we think Cettire complies with all the laws, and we think the way they act is very consistent with other online players. We also don't agree with the claim that Cettire's success will threaten its suppliers. In fact, we think the opposite's true.
The bigger and more important Cettire becomes, the more important it is for its suppliers, and I think that's where Cettire is becoming. It's actually becoming quite an important route to market for many of its suppliers. We're very happy to be long Charlie, Cettire still, despite all the noise in the press.
You've made the case that Regal is bullish on resources. Are there any commodities in particular that you favor?
Yeah, we've been bullish on commodities for a number of years, mainly because of what we're seeing on the supply side and the number of constraints that are occurring: political pressure, rising capital expenditure, rising operating costs, and the lack of new discoveries. This is all limiting supply over the next few years. In fact, two of our preferred commodities, uranium and copper, have seen supply disruptions in recent weeks that have caused the commodity prices to pop, and in our view, this just illustrates how tight supply is. Our least preferred commodity remains iron ore, where the collapse of the Chinese property market is still flowing through to our iron ore prices, and with huge amounts of new supply around the corner in Africa over the next few years, we're pretty happy to be long other commodities.
As a whole, we're still very, very bullish on resources, and we think mining stocks is a great place to invest in the next few years.
Jess, I've probably got a couple for you here. Are you more focused on listed or unlisted investment within the emerging company strategy at present?
Thanks, Charlie. I'd say over the past two years, we've been pretty focused on listed markets. We've generally been finding better value there, and this is probably due to two key reasons. One, the disconnect that has emerged during the bear market between public and private market valuations, and secondly, of course, the premium that should be ascribed to liquidity in today's environment. All that being said, we believe that more and more compelling opportunities are arising on the private side, and one thing we do like about private investments is our ability to carefully structure these through downside-protected instruments such as convertible notes.
Just a follow-up question there, Jess. What changes have you made to the small emerging portfolios, and where are you seeing opportunities in the current market environment?
Sure. As I said, in emerging, we've been very focused on listed markets, and for both emerging and small caps, I'd say we're really excited about areas of the market that we believe can outperform in an environment where rates will probably trend lower as this is favorable for some longer-duration growth exposures. Our belief in rates having peaked last year gave us confidence to transition the portfolio to high-quality exposures in areas like technology, software, healthcare, FinTech. Many of these names often underperformed during the rate hiking cycle. Previously, I discussed examples like DUG Technology, Gentrack, Life360; they fall into this bucket. Another name which Regal recently went substantial on and fits this bill is Zip, it's had a really incredible transformation over the past year. It's turned cash EBITDA profitable.
It's resumed its US growth trajectory, and it's really restructured its balance sheet, reducing its convertible debt from over $500 million to zero. We continue to like and own growth names like this in addition to other names such as Chrysos, Cettire, and HUB24, but of course, we love diversification, so you're always also going to find a decent weighting in the portfolio to value-oriented plays, whether these are miners or other industrials.
Here's one that's just come in online from an investor, probably for you, Gav. A lot of Australian private credit funds seem to be forming. Is the landscape becoming crowded, and how does Regal seek to differentiate?
All right. Well, I would agree that there is a lot of capital that has been formed domestically, and the international funds, internationally focused funds, they're also seeking to raise money from Australian investors as well. I would agree with the assertion. I'd make a few points, I guess. One, with respect to the Aussie capital markets, the banks still heavily dominate. They represent, I don't know, it's over 80% of all credit created in the economy, so I'm thinking loans to companies, consumers, real estate. In other Western economies, that's more like 30%-60% depending on where we are. The regulatory tailwinds in Australia, they are structural, and they will require this private capital to form. That's especially the case for corporate and asset-backed credit, which is where we're focused. International funds, they are coming to Australia as well, but they typically offer portfolios of global credits.
They're not exclusively focused on Aussie credit like we are. It's important to remember that private credit still only represents, for many investors, a small percentage of their asset allocation versus equities, hybrids, real estate, the traditional allocations. We anticipate this allocation has room to grow, and that'll help to fill the capital needs of the borrowers that we're talking about. As it pertains to Regal specifically, unlike a lot of other private credit funds that are only focused on one strategy, we're focused on corporate credit, structured credit, and special situations, and we'll play depending on where we are in the cycle. Finally, as it pertains to private credit, a differentiator of success is access to deal flow. Regal's position in the broader capital markets really provides us with an extremely wide net of possible opportunities from which to select our investments.
Probably a follow-up question that's come through here online, Gavin. What is the private credit market outlook, and how are you seeking to position the portfolio for it?
We're broadly constructed, frankly, Charlie. There are some headwinds out there that I'll talk about, but this is a great time to be making loans. The broader market has navigated the unprecedented interest rate tightening surprisingly well with only a couple of minor casualties. I'm thinking the U.K. pension and U.S. regional banking sector had some issues about 12 months ago, but those pertain mainly to mark-to-market losses as opposed to credit losses. There are some watch-outs. The refinancing risk as fixed-rate loans roll off has been often talked about. Demand risk as excess consumer savings depletes is definitely something that we need to be mindful of. We're already seeing, with respect to that latter point, credit card delinquencies in the U.S. at 12-year highs.
We are conservatively positioned as it pertains to exposure to lower credit quality borrowers, particularly in the consumer and SME space, and discretionary spending from these cohorts. All that said, there's a wall of liquidity available at the moment. One of the biggest challenges that we have is to avoid chasing yields down and to maintain discipline in a market where there's a lot of capital looking for deals. If I can call out two sectors where we expect to deploy more capital in the next six months, it would be resources and energy. The regulatory changes, the difficulty of predicting the pace of transition, underinvestment in certain areas, and just the inherent cyclicality in those sectors are all drivers of the need for flexible capital, and our pipeline at the moment actually is reflective of that.
In the interest of time, we will stop there. Phil, Jess, Gavin, thank you for your time and insights. Thank you to everyone who has attended this webinar. The Regal Investment Team will continue to be focused on delivering RF1 investors attractive risk-adjusted absolute returns with limited correlations to equity markets over the years ahead. Have a good day.