Andy Jacobs
Analyst · JMP Securities. Please go ahead
Well, good morning, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. I’ll just start with a brief market overview. As everybody knows, interest rates across yield curve were volatile, very volatile in the third quarter. Although, the financial market expected interest rates to be increase short-term interest rate. In September the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee left interest rate unchanged in September, and then again, yesterday. But they are continue to say that they will take a wide range of information into account or simply said, they will be rather dependent. So far this quarter, in the fourth quarter, the 10-year rate has pretty much been trading in a range of about 23 basis points. That -- I think it had intraday low of about 190 and I think it’s had intraday high of 214, and yesterday, it close around 210, which was after the Fed most recent announcement. This rate volatility continued to be an uncertain with, quite challenging for company trying to manage their leverage portfolio of mortgage security. Our ARM securities portfolio has continued to outperform generic fixed rate mortgage security. During the quarter slots -- slots spread tightened significantly during the quarter leading to increase trade volatility, which has been a main driver for most of the reported book value declines we have seen so far this quarter -- in the third quarter. All-in, our book values declined $0.34 to $11.96. Two-third of this decline was attributable to the portfolio which related hedges, pricing and the remainder was attributable to the payment of the third quarter dividend in excess of earnings. For the last 12 months, our book value declined $0.64 and after considering the $1.22 in common dividend over the previous quarters, our economic return has been 4.6%. I think one other things you have look at is in the -- where our book value has declined the $0.34 in the current quarter and then the $0.64 over the last four quarters. The portion of that that with the payment of dividends in excess of earnings, that’s simply is putting cash in the shareholder pocket, not book value decline. But if you take that element out of it and just purely look at it as to the declining book value over the last 12 months, last four quarters, our book decline has been less than 30%, which I think is pretty good performance relative to all the volatility we have seen which reflects the benefit of our full duration ARM strategy. Now respect to the third quarter operating results, our net income was $21.1 million or $0.18 per common share. Our net interest margins related to our investment portfolio declined $3 million to $27.2 million and financing spreads declined 10 basis points. Most of this decline that we saw was attributable to mortgage prepayments, which increased to 23.2 CPR from 22 CPR in the previous quarter and as, you all know, you use to hearing right now, for each full CPR change quarter-over-quarter it’s worth upward of about $1.5 million in quarterly premium amortization, but that goes both ways. As prepayments decline we get the benefit of up to a $1.5 million for every CPR. So the 1.2% -- 1.2 CPR increase in the third quarter basically takes into account the $1.3 million premium increase that we saw during the quarter for our amortization. The other driver of lower financing spreads was higher borrowing rates, which were higher by about 7 basis points from previous quarter and this -- the increase was largely attributable to expectations during the quarter that the Fed action, they would raise interest rates in September. And then the other part was the use of to some degree the greater use of higher rate, longer maturity secured borrowings, which I will get into a little bit more in just a minute. As everybody knows to help mitigate exposure to raising rates, we will use two-year interest rate swaps, we able to do two year because of the short duration of our ARM security portfolio. At the end of the quarter we have $8.4 billion in swap-related instruments. We also had about $3.25 billion in longer maturity secured borrowings, with maturities through the first quarter 2017. But here is what -- but you have to get a little bit, it’s challenging here, it should be the longer maturity of our -- some of our repo is really not necessarily pure hedges. It’s liability management. As -- I think everybody on this call recognizes that as you move into year end for the last number of years, where there has been concerns as to how the banking system and regulations and in this case, that we asked whether the Fed moved in December. So it’s just -- this is liability managing of making sure you got sufficient repo at appropriate rates in here. So this fits less of a hedge versus liability management from that same point. And I just -- I also want to point out is that in August, we began borrowing advances from the Federal Home Loan Bank at Cincinnati. And we had $2.3 billion at the end of September. Regarding our portfolio, our portfolio declined slightly. We’re lower than $14 billion at this point in time. Our leverage in this case because of the decline that we saw in our book value, our leverage increased slightly to 8.8%. But at 8.8 to 1 with our full duration portfolio, we are very comfortable with this degree of leverage that we have in our portfolio. The duration of our investment portfolio is 11 and a quarter months. And after 8 and three quarter months duration of our borrowings, our net duration is about two and half months, which I think is going to be one of the lowest especially with the underlying assets at 11 and a quarter is going to be one of the lowest duration than anybody in this space. Just a few final remarks. As everybody knows, we reduced our third quarter dividend at $0.26. We were disappointed that we had to do that but this higher interest rate volatility and definitely high mortgage refinance rates necessitated us to move. But in spite of the dividend test that we have, we remain confident and focused on our investment strategy. And we’re just going to be managing our leverage portfolio of agency ARM securities. One of the key things here though is that future level of mortgage prepayments will be key in future portfolio yields that we have but keep in mind that seasonality as people are saying. So you’ve seen prepayment likely peak earlier in the third quarter and begin to decline, now going to the fourth quarter and into the first quarter, seasonality is going to be more reflective in there. So going back to the -- how much have CPR changed, we haven’t getting lower, translate into a $1.5 million in earnings on a quarterly basis. The seasonality of lower prepayments will come into play with that. So taking all that in consideration, I think, as you all do. So with that, I will open it up to some questions.