Peter Federico
Analyst · KBW
Yes. Great question, Ken. Thank you. What I would say is that there are sort of some specific signals that would be beneficial. So obviously, mortgages were weaker again in April. And we're right sort of at the edge now with the Fed making its announcement on the balance sheet tomorrow. But I would say there's probably 4 things that would benefit the market. And I think we're going to get clarity on these 4 elements over the next, call it, 1 to 3 months. So it's a relatively short-term thing. But first, I think we need to see greater interest rate stability. And now with interest rates from 3 years to 10 years essentially at 3%, we're probably pretty close to the sort of a full repricing of the interest rate expectation. Of course, there's still some risk that the terminal Fed funds rate is going to be higher than what the Fed initially indicated. So that's going to have to play out a little bit. But I think we -- the market just generally speaking, would benefit from greater interest rate stability. And hopefully, we're getting near that point. The second, and this sort of builds on Chris' point, we understand and the market understands importantly, which is why we think valuations should generally have reflected this. The technicals for the mortgage market are sort of most challenging over the next, call it, 1 to 3 months. So while the market knows this, we want to see the market start to trade stably during that time period. So that would be another signal that we would be looking for. The third, which I'm not sure when we'll get this information, but I think the market would benefit from greater understanding of the Fed's long-term runoff plans. If you think back to when the market sort of got pretty weak in April, it was right around the time period where the agency market that is when the Chairman was talking about front-loading interest rate hikes and sort of the market interpreted that as maybe a signal that they might front-load or be more aggressive on the balance sheet. We don't think that's going to be the case. We think the Fed is going to be very measured on its balance sheet in order to facilitate a much more aggressive interest rate approach, but some additional information and thinking from the Fed on the long-term runoff plan will be helpful. And then lastly, this is a point that Aaron mentioned, which is really important, is we're going to be looking at bond flows and for the last several months, of course, given all the pressure in the fixed income market broadly, bond flows have been experiencing significant outflows. That has started to slow in the last couple of weeks. And eventually, we expect it to stop, and we expect actually bond inflows given the absolute level of returns that are available in that repricing. So that will be a significant indicator of strength in the market. And then, of course, we know that there's lots of index investors, as Chris has mentioned, that are still underweight MBS. So those would be the signals, if you will, that we're looking for, and we think we're going to get a lot of clarity on those points over the next few months. I hope that answers your question.