Craig Knutson
Analyst · Jessica Levi-Ribner from FBR
Thank you, Harold. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to MFA's Third Quarter 2017 Financial Results Webcast. With me today are Steve Yarad, CFO; Gudmundur Kristjansson, Senior Vice President; Brian Wolfson, Senior Vice President; Hal Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Counsel; and other members of Senior Management. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the comfort and kind suspended to us by investors, shareholders, equity analyst and other monetary management team. After the Fed passing the Bill Gorin in August. Bill's absence is a big loss to MFA and to all of us personally, and we're grateful to the support you provided to us. We can now move to the presentation. MFA had an active third quarter of 2017, as our team successfully transacted on multiple fronts within the residential mortgage universe. With continued strong pricing and mortgage and credit assets, it is challenging to find attractively priced assets. Our investment team has worked tirelessly to find opportunities, while maintaining price and discipline. Our third quarter earnings was $0.15 per share, down from $0.20 in the second quarter, due primarily to 2 factors. The first is CRP prices, which were negatively impacted in August, and again in September, largely due to concerns about possible property damage caused by hurricane Harvey, and Irma. This price decline was modest, approximately $5 million. But since the account for these assets under the fair value option, this $5 million price decline is reflected as a loss in our income statement. Furthermore, this compares to a significant price increase of nearly $14 million for these same assets in the second quarter, which was reflected as a game in our income statement in the second quarter. The second factors that negatively impacted third quarter earnings was the one-time expense incurred pursuant to contractual obligation of the company in connection with that depth of Mr. Gorin. Book value declines slightly to $7.70 from $7.76 in the second quarter, due primarily to the declaration of a $0.20 dividend, which exceeds earnings by $0.05. This was the 16th consecutive quarter in which we have paid $0.20 dividend. MFA's book value has been remarkably stable, for the last 5 quarters, book value has ranged from a low of $7.62 to a high of $7.76. This range is less than 2% from low to high. This is due to our asset selection process, coupled with very modest leverage levels. We remain very active in the investment market in a third quarter, investing or committing to purchase nearly $600 million of assets. Our portfolio runoff was again high in the third quarter, approximately $1 billion, but was down from the unprecedented level of $1.75 billion in the second quarter. And we expected our portfolio runoff will continue to trend lower in the fourth quarter. Finally, our estimated undistributed taxable income as of September 30, 2017, was $0.15 per share. If we could turn to Page 4, please. MFA began operations nearly 20 years ago. And the company has generated strong and consistent long-term returns to investors through volatile markets and through various interest rates in credit cycles. Since January of 2000, we've generated annualized shareholder returns of approximately 15%. As we have over the last 5 and 10-year periods. And over the last 12 months, our total shareholder return has exceeded 25%. We can turn to page 5, please. On Page 5, we summarized our current investment strategy. In 2017, we focused primarily on credit-sensitive residential mortgage assets. The credit assets we've acquired continued to perform well, tend to be short-term in nature and therefore have less interest-rate sensitivity. Many of our assets were purchased at a discount, so they actually benefit from increases in prepayment rates. Investor expectations of improved economic growth have positively impacted credit sensitive assets, as have continued home-price appreciation and repaired borrower credit profiles. While these trends are positive for the assets that we own, they result in higher mortgage pricing makes new invest in more challenging by altering risk return profiles. We have maintained price and discipline, which means sometimes we don't lend bids. While continuously be evaluating our existing asset classes, as well as exploring new opportunities. One such opportunity has been MFA's related investments, which will talk about shortly. Our strategy does require staying power, which gives us the ability to invest in and hold long-term distressed less liquid assets, and positions us to take advantage quickly in a meaningful way, should market disruptions create attractive investment opportunities. We are permitted equity capital, our debt-to-equity ratio has loan up to accommodate potential declines in marks. And our liquidity combined with portfolio runoff from short assets gives us the ability to invest significant amount as we identify attractive investment opportunities. And we invest with a focus on long-term performance. Turning to Page 6. The supply of credit sensitive residential hold is sporadic. That is we can only buy them when they are for sale. As opposed to agency MBS, which can be bought or sold every day. This is quite a challenging investment environment, we purchased or committed to purchase nearly $600 million of assets in the third quarter. Portfolio runoff while still high, slowed from $1.75 billion in the second quarter through $1 billion in the third quarter. We did see some spread widening in CRT securities due to concerns of our 2 hurricanes that made land falls in August and September. But as more data becomes available, it appears that much of this concern was likely an overreaction and spreads marketably recovered. Now I'm going to turn the call over to Steve Yarad, who will provide further details on the results for the third quarter.