Welcome to the AG Mortgage Investment Trust First Quarter 2015 Earnings Call. My name is Christine and I will be your operator for today’s call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Karen Werbel, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for today’s conference call to review AG Mortgage Investment Trust’s first quarter 2015 results and recent developments. Joining me on today’s call are David Roberts, our Chief Executive Officer; Jonathan Lieberman, our Chief Investment Officer; and Brian Sigman, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to review our Safe Harbor statement. Today’s conference call and corresponding slide presentation contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All such statements are intended to be subject to the protection provided by the Reform Act. Statements regarding the following subjects are forward-looking statements by their nature: our business and investment strategy, market trends and risks, assumptions regarding interest rates and prepayments, changes in the yield curve and changes in government programs or regulations affecting our business. The company’s actual results may differ materially from those projected due to the impact of many factors beyond its control. All forward-looking statements included in this conference call and the slide presentation, are based on our beliefs and expectations as of today, May 7, 2015. Please note that information reported on today’s call speaks only as of today. And therefore, you are advised that time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of the time of any replay listening or transcript reading. Additional information concerning the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements are included in the Risk Factors section of the company’s periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Copies of the reports are available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. Finally, we disclaim any obligation to update our forward-looking statements, unless required by law.

Thank you, Karen and good morning everyone. From an overview point of view, this quarter was very similar to the past quarter. We again had solid core earnings exceeding our dividend. It’s our seventh consecutive quarter issuing a $0.60 dividend. We continue to move out of the agency section of the portfolio and look for value-added assets. That is a key metric for us and a key focus of our team using the Angelo, Gordon platform. We are seeing a lot of very interesting opportunities. We maintain what we consider to be appropriately conservative leverage and interest rate positioning in a volatile interest rate environment. With that introduction, I will turn things over to Jonathan Lieberman, President and CIO of AG Mortgage Investment Trust. Thank you.

Thank you, David. Good morning, all. So, just to talk a little bit first about the markets and then go into the details of our quarter, so for the first three months of 2015, RMBS non-agency and ABS markets rebounded and experienced strong increase in trading activity after relatively soft December. Credit and ABS credit spreads moderately tightened as new capital float into the markets, especially the higher yielding securities with favorable technicals and sound fundamentals. The one notable exception to this trend was in agency RMBS. The mortgage basis came under pressure in response to lower interest rates and fewer potentially higher prepayment speeds. The agency MBS market like the interest rate market has been a challenging sector to navigate over the past four months with a material pickup in volatility and weakening liquidity. In contrast, structured credit markets were generally unaffected by the sharp decline in oil prices, unanticipated lower interest rates and losses in high yield and bank loan markets. Index or beta-like securities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s risk transferred transactions rallied in the first quarter after struggling in the fourth quarter. Interest rates during the quarter declined in response to weakening U.S. economic activity, geopolitical concerns, concerns over Greece, declining worldwide interest rates that dragged us lower, but as many of you have seen in the last two weeks they have risen significantly even in the face of choppy, poor economic data other than maybe just overall employment levels. Negative net issuance or non-agency RMBS and ABS continues to support our market with respect to borrower performance, the trend of improving consumer and mortgage credit quality continues to hold. Overall, the U.S. economy continues to grow, but in a sideways and modeled fashion with few indications of acceleration. The rapid worldwide currency adjustments…

Thanks, Jonathan. In the first quarter, we reported core earnings of $17.9 million, or $0.63 per fully diluted share versus $18.4 million or $0.65 per share in the prior quarter. At March 31, we had a negative $0.02 retrospective adjustment to our premium amortization on our agency portfolio. Stripping this out, core would have been $0.65. If we rerun our cash flow today, we would have a positive retrospective adjustment of $0.02. We are pleased with this result and it marks the sixth quarter in a row, where our core has met or exceeded our common dividend. Overall for the quarter, we reported net income available to common stockholders of $9.4 million, or $0.33 per fully diluted share. The $0.63 of core earnings was offset by net realized and unrealized losses of $0.29 per share. The $0.29 million loss was primarily due to $0.34 of net realized losses on our security portfolio, which was offset by $0.05 of net unrealized gains on the portfolio. At March 31, our book value was $19.87, a slight decrease of $0.26 or 1.3% from last quarter. To give you a better sense of our current $3.5 billion portfolio, I would like to highlight a few more statistics. As described on Page 3, 4 and 5 of our presentation, the portfolio of March 31, 2015 had a net interest margin of 3.08%. This was composed of an asset yield of 4.6% offset by rebound swap cost of 1.13% and 0.40% respectively for a total cost of funds of 1.5%. We are pleased that our net interest margin continued to trend higher. This quarter, the increase was driven primarily by a decrease of 31 basis points in our cost of hedging mostly as a result of the termination of approximately $400 million of interest rate swaps during the quarter. We do not have any forward starting swaps and therefore our swap costs reflect the true cost of our swaps. On the funding side, we continue to be active. In February, we extended the funding period for another year on the $100 million facility that finances our residential mortgage loan. In April, we extended the maturity on our facility that finances some of our non-agency securities. This facility was extended for another year and as part of the renewal, we increased close to $200 million, while also lowering certain borrowing rates as well as certain bond specific haircuts. Additionally, we entered into a new 3-year financing on another $100 million of agency repo during the quarter. Our liquidity remains strong and at quarter end we have a total liquidity of $185.4 million, which was composed of $42 million of cash, $100 million of un-levered agency hopeful securities and $43 million of un-levered agency IO securities. That concludes our prepared remarks. And we would now like to open the call for questions. Operator?

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question is from Jason Stewart of Compass Point. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I was hoping you could give us a little bit more detail on the consumer portfolio. Maybe on if there is a secured portion to it unsecured, just any details there would be very helpful?

Sure. It’s an unsecured product, installment sale contract types of contracts from respected counterparty issuer. We bought it in securitized format. MITT participated with other Angelo, Gordon funds in buying junior securities, which have attractive carry profiles, very, very secured in terms of their ability to tolerate any potential credit loss. The issuer retains material economic exposure as the securities carry very well. They are rated securities.

Okay. So, this would be – I think I understand where this position is. I am actually I am more interested in where you think that could go whether you think it could translate into an investment into actual loans or how big this could end up getting?

We don’t have any distinct plans to basically acquire consumer loans to put into MITT. This would really fell into more of an opportunistic trade with great carry profile, potentially some capital appreciation when we exit the position.

Okay, fair enough. And then if we could just pullback a little bit and look at MITT from the global Angelo, Gordon platform and if you could just take a multi-year view and describe what you think the plan is in-house. I mean, it’s obviously when you described the investment professionals, there is quite a few there. That’s clearly not supported necessarily only by MITT, in part by MITT, but if you could just describe what Angelo, Gordon’s maybe multiyear plan is for this product?

Yes, it’s David Roberts talking. We have deep background in the real estate business and that’s led us to really looking globally at real estate assets of all sorts of different sectors and it’s also led us to look at real estate debt in all sorts of different sectors. So, we have got all these professionals looking at real estate related assets and MITT is our only permanent capital vehicle. And so what we are constantly looking at are opportunities to use the expertise at our platform to match up assets with MITT’s structure, which is permanent capital yield oriented assets. We all know it’s a very pricy time relative to other times in the past in the real estate area, but we see a lot of opportunities and I would say we are optimistic that over the coming years or quarters, hopefully, we are going to find some good matches. So, we have a broad network, where the people who are focused on MITT are in constant dialogue with our real estate professionals and we would hope to take advantage of that over time.

Okay, thanks for taking the questions. Appreciate it.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We have no further questions. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.