Before we get into the presentation, so Portman Ridge is a publicly traded business development corporation, or BDC. For those unfamiliar, a BDC is a tax-advantaged structure very similar to a REIT or an MLP. The focus is a distribution of at least 90% of earnings to shareholders in any given year. Specifically for Portman Ridge, unlike a REIT or an MLP, Portman Ridge operates within the broader private credit sector and is primarily focused on originating and underwriting loans to private U.S.-based companies. So you can see here, a ticker PTMN. Again, as mentioned, we are a yield-focused business development corporation. So our last quarterly distribution was $0.69. That's been consistent for the last six quarters and has been steadily increasing since we took over management of the business in 2019.
At that $0.69 quarterly distribution, that would generate about a 15% yield at the market value of the stock or a 13% yield on the book value of the stock. So just a little bit about Portman Ridge. As mentioned, we are focused primarily on directly originated senior secured loans to middle market companies. So for us, we view that as, again, U.S.-based, and somewhere in the $10-$50 million of EBITDA range is about our sweet spot in terms of company size. We have an experienced and strategic management team that's focused on execution and delivering NII growth. Additionally, Portman Ridge is externally managed by Sierra Crest Investment Management, which is part of a $40 billion global asset manager in BC Partners. BC Partners operates across private credit, private equity, and real estate strategies.
As of June 30th, 2024, Portman Ridge had almost $500 million of assets, and approximately 88% of those assets were floating-rate securities that are priced at a spread to primarily SOFR. Additionally, we have 75 different unique debt and equity portfolio companies. Our average position size is about $2.6 million, which is a little bit less than 1% of our portfolio. So taking a bit of a step back on the private credit space and where we operate within the markets, so over a several-decade period, as we'll kind of walk through on the slide here, there has been a very long-term trend of capital moving away from traditional bank lending institutions and into what we now call the private credit sector. So starting kind of in the 1990s, partially due to some of the savings and loan scandals in that time period, banks overall began to consolidate.
And what that ultimately led to was regulators calling for increased regulations, increased scrutiny on creditworthiness. And so what that drove over the ensuing, let's call it decade, was in general a decline in capital access to private companies, creating more opportunities for public companies, and particularly for larger public companies. So kind of you see in the middle bullet here in the second column, public companies listed were five times higher on average market value than the prior 20 years. And at least for ourselves, where it's more applicable in the high-yield market, the percentage of high-yield issuers at $300 million or below declined from about 40% of the market to less than 5% of the market in 2019, and it's going even lower where we sit today.
So as that capital shifted to the larger companies, what that also led to was or coincided with a rise in private equity. So private equity seeking to capitalize on the larger public companies saw AUM increasing about 4x since 2002, and deal volume in the private equity side surpassed the public equity side starting in 2015, and candidly hasn't really looked back. And so for, again, where Portman Ridge sits in here, the rise of private equity ultimately drove the rise of private credit as those same institutional investors that were allocating to private equity started allocating to private credit. You saw banks continuing to pull back on lending standards and, sorry, continuing to tighten lending standards and pull back on lending just due to increased regulation, Dodd-Frank, things that arose during the GFC.
With that, it really created a good market opportunity for private credit to increase its market share. Just a very simple graphical representation of this, as early or as recently as 2008, fund managers such as BC Partners, Portman Ridge, were only slightly larger than kind of overall banks in terms of providing debt capital. As you see now in 2023, you see, again, the fund managers are now almost two times the size of kind of bank lenders in terms of where we operate in the market. I won't spend too much time on this slide, but as I mentioned, kind of private equity, generally speaking, in the growth there is driving private credit.
But what this slide particularly wants to focus on is the amount of unrealized private equity holdings has increased significantly over, again, this is kind of an over 20-year period, but has increased significantly over the last handful of years. And on the very bottom of the slide here, again, where we find this attractive in terms of tailwinds going forward is a traditional private equity hold size is about three to five years. And what you've seen for a various number of reasons, you've seen that hold size continue to creep up from a duration perspective. And where we are now, we're at kind of all-time highs in terms of hold sizes.
And so for us, what that means is we would anticipate pent-up demand in the M&A front as a number of these private equity firms will ultimately need to realize this value through new transactions, which from our perspective then would drive our origination. So why private credit versus a high-yield bond fund or some kind of comparable fixed-income product? So private credit, we have an extensive focus on due diligence and downside protection for all of our individual investments. Our focus is on preserving capital, and from a structuring perspective, we bake in a number of protections within our credit agreements, such as gross and net leverage tests depending on the industry, perhaps some specific industry-focused retention metrics. We typically have negative covenants on new debt issuances and sales of collateral and things of that nature.
We have asset liens, we have call protection, we have scheduled amortization and excess cash flow sweeps that force companies, as they're generating cash flow, to continue to pay down our debt, further reduce our sort of attachment point relative to enterprise value. So again, we won't spend a ton of time on this, but as you can see here for total returns, generally speaking, private debt, both traditional senior secured floating rate as well as private debt, mezzanine debt, have generally speaking outperformed even the S&P, but also investment-grade high-yield and the leveraged loan index. And so again, that has been helped, generally speaking, in the past couple of years by the rising interest rates. But I would say in periods of declining interest rate environments, what we ultimately see is increased portfolio rotation.
So most of our portfolio have upfront fees and have exit fees, call protection on the back end, so as rates go down, you ultimately see an increase in our portfolio churn, and that leads to increasing fees and economics on the back end for us, so from our perspective, we are, again, within certain bands, we are somewhat agnostic to rising rate or declining rate environment because we'll make up our return either on the front end or the back end, just kind of depending on what environment you're in, so I mentioned this is our management team. Brandon Satoren, our Chief Financial Officer, is sitting here as well. Prior to joining BC Partners, he was a controller at Pennant Park, another publicly traded BDC. Ted Goldthorpe is our CEO.
Prior to starting and founding our BC Partners credit platform, he was a president at Apollo Investment Corporation, a publicly traded BDC that's now MidCap Financial, was a chief investment officer of that vehicle, and he actually sat on the senior management committee for Apollo Credit as a whole. Again, what I'd like to stress on this page is that as it relates to Portman Ridge, the BC Partners credit investment team is made up of 30 investment professionals that are dedicated to underwriting, sourcing, originating, and monitoring credit assets and portfolio companies that sit within Portman Ridge. So where do we differentiate ourselves? Two ways, which is firstly, we are a part of a large global private equity firm. We have no Chinese walls across our firm.
And so what that allows us to do is access various different parts of our private equity side of the house where it's applicable on our credit side and our underwriting. So as an example, we have 62 private equity professionals across the globe, and very often they are continuously meeting with management teams and sectors and finding opportunities that are ultimately interesting for us on the credit side, whether it's a smaller company than they're used to or a company that just needs a small amount of incremental capital. We will often get deal flow from our private equity side as they are going out and looking for companies to purchase. On the operations side, we have eight dedicated operating partners on the private equity side that manage things from procurement, HR benefits, supply chain logistics, IT specialists.
So to the extent that's helpful and applicable to our various different borrowers, we can actually leverage those relationships internally and source cheaper purchasing contracts, better insurance for our portfolio companies. I mentioned a bit on the origination, but our private equity team is focused on four core sectors: TMT, healthcare, business services, and sort of industrial. And so what that allows us to do, again, is on the diligence front to leverage their deep industry expertise for a particular name to see if they have feedback on a management team, on a particular sector, on a particular product within a company that we're looking at. And so from our perspective, that is infinitely valuable on both the sourcing and the underwriting side.
Where we believe we differentiate ourselves from other direct lenders and other potential public BDCs you might be looking at, a couple of things just running down here. So again, as mentioned, we are part of an integrated global asset manager. We're able to share best practices from our private equity side that most of our competitors either don't have or don't have the capability of connecting across their private equity and private credit as they have Chinese walls. Again, I've showed you a number of charts about our private credit sector increasing in AUM and growing quite rapidly. Most of our competitors have continued to increase their AUM and grow up market. And so we have chosen to remain focused on companies that tend to $50 million of EBITDA.
And from our perspective, we found that has overall led to a reduction in competition, which allows us to negotiate better terms, better pricing, better protections as the borrowers tend to have less opportunities for other lenders as opposed to a larger company. Again, I touched a little bit on this number three, but I would say, again, what separates us from some of the other business development companies or direct lenders is we have a very healthy mix of sponsor and non-sponsor transactions.
So while we do a significant amount of sponsor-backed businesses, we're financing private equity companies, we also focus very heavily on our origination efforts on management-owned companies, founder-owned businesses, and places where there's not a traditional institutional backing that, again, allows us to partner with the management team, structure and price something that's more attractive priced, better structured, allows us to, again, bring our capabilities and value add to the situation and be more than just a capital solutions provider. We're actually helping with the operations. Again, just running through quickly our investment objectives, focus on directly originated senior secured loans to middle market, target company size of $10-$50 million of EBITDA. We utilize our entire BC Partners platform to directly originate and invest in loans.
It allows for greater sourcing and ability to leverage our capabilities across the spectrum of investment opportunities from liquid transactions to larger transactions or even smaller transactions. Generally speaking, we generate alpha through market dislocations, through structural documentation, and just general relationships and regional expertise across our private equity operating platform as well as our own operating partners that we have on the credit side. Our focus is generally on capital preservation and maximizing the margin of safety through both, generally speaking, financial diligence, but as well as structural protections, covenants, and covenant levels specifically that allow us to have a seat at the table much more quickly within a company, sorry, much more quickly within a company and kind of be able to drive an outcome as opposed to be a passive participant in the journey. So just a quick scan here.
Again, we have 75 different portfolio investing companies. Our average position size is about $2.6 million, which is less than 1% of assets. Almost 100% of our companies are U.S.-based, and if you look sort of on the bottom right in terms of industry diversification, generally speaking, our focus is on non-cyclical industries with high free cash flow generation. So you see high-tech industries that's typically software and sort of some telecom, but generally software, business services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, banking, and financial insurance tend to be our large sectors, which generally speaking are relatively resilient. So I'll skip through this. This is just a very, very simple representation of how you can see sort of our underlying benchmarks have sort of increased substantially over time. On the M&A front, again, I won't go through all the individual columns here, but I want to bring this up to highlight.
We at Portman Ridge are one of the very few public BDCs of any size and scale that has a track record of successfully completing inorganic growth acquisitions. So we have listed here, since we took over management in 2019, we've completed three separate M&A transactions where we've merged in other public BDCs and their portfolios into ours. The numbers on the page here just sort of show both the rotation of those portfolios over time as well as the fact that when you kind of aggregate all of the portfolios, we have generally realized value that is slightly in excess of the market values that we're acquiring the assets. So again, have a good track record of realizing portfolio rotation and value through M&A.
I think there's probably one or two slides left, but if you really want to give the elevator pitch on Portman Ridge, as you can see on the top chart, and I mentioned it earlier, our dividend yield as a percentage of book value is about a 13% dividend yield. That puts us in close to the top quartile of publicly traded BDCs, our competitors, and you look at the bottom chart, our price to book where we are now is somewhere kind of in the high 80s to close to 90%, with 87% here as of the time that we put the data together. That would put us a little bit below sort of the average of the BDCs.
And so from our perspective, or at least from your perspective as a potential shareholder, you're getting an above-average coupon on your investment while sort of you're waiting for a pricing reset or a general price appreciation. So that, again, kind of would be, I think, the pure financial elevator pitch. But just overall investment takeaways, Portman Ridge, it's a small-cap BDC backed by BC Partners, which is a global asset manager. We have an experienced and strategic management team that's focused on execution and delivering earnings growth. Again, we've completed over three acquisitions within Portman Ridge since taking over as manager, and ideally, we'd like to continue that in the future. We have a solid and steady dividend history.
Again, we've had a $0.69 quarterly dividend for six quarters in a row now, and that had been steadily increasing from about $0.60 dividend from the time we took over Portman Ridge as manager in 2019. We believe we have stockholder alignment and have done a number of friendly stockholder transactions, such as since early 2020, we have had a fairly consistent share repurchase program in place. I don't know the exact numbers, but we've probably purchased over or close to $10 million of stock over the last several years just through kind of standard buyback programs. So again, doing things that we believe are attractive for our long-term shareholders and capturing that trading discount over time in the market. So with that, I think that leaves us about six minutes. So I will open it up to Q&A to the extent anyone has any questions.
What are your sources of funds?
Yeah. So on the debt side, and obviously the rest will be equity, but on the debt side, we have a $108 million bond issuance that's 4.875% that's due in 2026. And then we have a $200 million credit facility with J.P. Morgan that's SOFR plus 270. We recently amended and extended that in August to upsize it. We have at least an additional kind of $75 million or so of capacity through an accordion feature within the facility. That has, I think, a three-year investment period on that, and we have been partners with J.P. Morgan since 2019. And so every year or two, we amend and extend that facility out to kind of continue to have about a three to four-year investment period on that. And then the rest is debt.
So right now, we're at about a 1.2-1.3 times net debt to equity ratio. So again, the remaining will be the equity component.
In terms of, is it mostly club deals? Because I don't think that you can beat a single member.
Yeah. So again, which maybe didn't come out in the presentation, but one of the benefits of being it's kind of a nuance here, but we actually have the ability to invest across our entire credit platform at BC Partners in the same transactions. So Portman Ridge is one of several BC funds that are participating in a transaction. So from a shareholder perspective, we have a $5-$6 million hold size in Portman Ridge, but our platform as a whole perhaps did a $100 million facility to a borrower.
So we are able to speak for a significantly larger size as a platform than we could with Portman Ridge as a standalone. So that's a long way of answering your question, which is most of our transactions are led by us and are done majority by BC Partners funds, but we do often participate in other lenders' deals to the extent that we find the deals are attractive or we bid on a deal and lost on it and have the ability to come into someone else's transaction. So long as we're able to get the right documentation and protections and things like that that we think are appropriate for the transaction, we do sometimes participate in other people's transactions, or we will underwrite a larger deal and sell out a portion of that on the back end to other lenders in the space.
I just wanted to try to generate a quote to use in dividend.
Yes, correct. That's correct. What's that?
Generate out of your income.
Yes. That's right. It's all generated out of income. So our asset yields are somewhere in the area of sort of 13%-14%, and then when you layer on some leverage and operating expenses and things like that, we're generally distributing about, again, $0.69 per quarter, which is about a 13% yield on our book value. How do you see the yield in the market back in the environment? You guys have been working on that for years. No, good question. Look, the short answer is who knows. I think the longer answer is I think you can go back to for a very long period of time, there are good economies with Democratic presidents. There are good economies with Republican presidents.
I personally think that the election has not as meaningful of a longer-term impact on the economy relative to other things like the Fed rates and things of that nature. So look, I think we are positioned defensively in terms of, again, we're focused on non-cyclical businesses that generate high free cash flow, and we look at enterprise value coverage. So from a micro perspective, sort of we try to be pre-agnostic to macro trends. But I would say, generally speaking, uncertainty tends to be good for our business because as there's more uncertainty around the macro, private equity firms or other folks are more interested in taking a certain solution from us and paying a little bit more for that relative to taking their chances in the public markets or waiting an extra year to refinance out something.
They would rather get the growth capital in today versus taking a chance out in the future. So generally speaking, uncertainty is good for our business, but I would say we try to position our portfolio somewhat agnostically to politics. By all means.
Is there a particular sector that's like the non-cyclicals that you personally think Portman Ridge focused more on? What's kind of your favorite?
Yeah. I think in general, our favorite sector tends to be sort of the larger enterprise software businesses. They tend to be a lot stickier sell. They tend to have better contract terms, better visibility. The sales cycle is a little bit longer, but we like the stickiness of that product within their customer base. So that tends to be a sector that we like a decent amount.
We probably have a little bit more banking financials than perhaps some other BDCs just because we are a global asset manager. So we understand financials a little bit more than other people do and understand what makes a financial institution valuable versus not. But I would say, again, if you want to pick a particular sector, I think software tends to be the area where we find sort of the most attractive, stable underlying credits.
Thank you so much. Any further questions can be taken outside.