First, we do not make money from running BDCinvestor, we do not sell advertising on any of the discussion sites (although we tried that once), and we certainly will never sell your email address to some spam list.

The three of us, Greg, Adam, and Ben sit on the Boards of several companies that we have started together over the years, the most successful of which has been Ticker Technologies. Prior to working together on Ticker Technologies, we put together BankInvestor.com as a destination for bank investors to learn about and discuss bank IPOs, publicly traded bank stocks, and related topics. Greg has particular expertise in this area, and is an active BankInvestor participant. We all benefit from having a destination for a community of like minded investors, where discussion is monitored to prevent abuse. BankInvestor also benefits Ticker Technologies by allowing us to showcase our technology, and demonstrate our software to potential customers.

Over the years, American Capital has been brought up in conversation on BankInvestor and has recently gotten the attention of several of us here, who now own stock in the company as well as other BDCs. Ben and Adam attempted to participate in some of the larger public discussion forums, and were discouraged to find an environment where multiple aliases are abused, and individuals both long and short use the forums solely to further their own position and opinion. In this type of environment, discussion between individuals who seriously want to talk and learn is difficult.

At the same time, ACAS was coming up in conversation more often on the BankInvestor site, and it looked like folks there could make use of a new site dedicated to BDC discussion. We saw the opportunity to apply the software we developed for BankInvestor to this new site. We hope BDCinvestor will grow to become a safe and trusting community of investors where discussion is not stifled, people don't have to wonder whether they are talking to one person or various aliases, the environment is respectful, and nobody is attacked for expressing their point of view. There is no such thing as a stupid question!

Ben and Adam are interested in continually participating in the discussion, but we don't want to disclose the monikers we post under because we don't want anyone to lend any "extra weight" to what we say just because we are involved with the site. We are by no means experts -- we're still learning -- and we certainly don't have any more knowledge and experience than anyone else. We hope you understand this reason for wanting to remain anonymous in the discussion forum.

Any of us may log in and post under the moniker "sysop" (short for system operator) when we want to get a message out to the group. You can private post to sysop, or email info@bdcinvestor.com if you would like to send a message to any of us.

Thanks, and see you online!