ARMOUR Residential REIT, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Armour Residential REIT's third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jim Mountain, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Drew, and thank you to all of you for joining us this morning to discuss Armour's third quarter 2023 results. Today, I'm joined by Armour's co-CEOs, Scott Ulm and Jeff Zimmer, and our CIO, Mark Gruber. By now, everyone has access to Armour's earnings release, which can be found on our website, www.armorrete.com. This conference call includes forward-looking statements which are intended to be subject to the safe harbor protection provided by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The risk factor section of Armour's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission describes certain factors beyond Armour's control that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these forward-looking statements. Those periodic filings can be found on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All of today's forward-looking statements are subject to change without notice. We disclaim any obligation to update them unless required by law. Also, today's discussion refers to certain non-GAAP measures. These measures are reconciled with comparable gap measures in our earnings release. An online replay of this conference call will be available on our website shortly and will continue for one year. On September 29, 2023, Armour completed the previously announced one for five reverse stock split. All of the common share and per share amounts reflect the reverse stock split. Armour's Q3 GAAP net loss was $179.2 million. Net interest income was $3.6 million. Distributable earnings available to common stockholders was $50.2 million, or $1.08 per common share. This non-GAAP measure is defined as net interest income plus TBA drop income adjusted for the net coupon effect of interest rate swaps and futures contracts minus operating expenses net of management fee waivers. Asset yield of 4.65%, less cost of funds of 2.92%, resulted in a net interest margin of 1.73% for the quarter. Armour Capital Management is continuing to waive a portion of their management fees. They waived $1.65 million for Q3, which offsets operating expenses. The waiver will continue until further notice. Armour paid monthly common stock dividends per share of 40 cents for a total of $1.20 per share for the quarter. We previously announced that we will maintain the 40 cent per share common monthly dividend rate for the remainder of 2023. We prioritize maintaining a common share dividend appropriate for the intermediate term. rather than focusing on short-term market fluctuations. We expect to provide dividend guidance in late December, which will reflect our best understanding of current market conditions and outlooks at that time. Taken together with contractual dividends on preferred stock, Armour has made cumulative distributions to stockholders approaching $2.2 billion over our history. During the third quarter, we issued 7,628,578 shares under our common stock ATM program. That raised $191.4 million in capital after fees and expenses. This represents an average net proceeds of $25.09 per share. We also repurchased fractional shares for $233,000 in connection with the reverse stock split. We have historically been active repurchasing Armour common shares in the open market when trading price dislocation opportunities present themselves. Armour's board of directors has increased the company's stock repurchase authority to 2.5 million common shares effective Monday, October 30th, when our current blackout period ends. Quarter end book value was $21.73 per common share. The Treasury and mortgage markets have continued to be highly volatile since then. As of Tuesday night, October 24th, we estimated our book value to be approximately $17.95 per common share. Now let me turn the call over to Co-Chief Executive Officer Scott Ohm. Scott?

Thanks, Jim. The end of the third quarter and beginning of the fourth quarter presented some of the most difficult conditions for mortgage-backed securities since the onset of COVID-19 in March of 2020. We've seen a significant decline in MBS prices, primarily because of the nearly 125 basis point increase in 10-year treasury yields dropped to peak since June 30th. The widening in OAS caused mortgage assets to underperform similar duration treasuries even further. As a result, there have been broader investor redemptions in various bond funds, adding to the significant price pressures in the agency MBS market. We believe that much of this selling is driven by investors' existing overweight exposure to mortgage allocations relative to other investments. Our current book value of $17.95 as of October 24th fully reflects this decline in agency mortgage prices. However, the market value decline of Armoury common shares seems to have substantially overshot this book value move. It's important to note against this backdrop that the market is offering once-in-a-decade opportunities to invest in agency MBS with compelling returns and no appreciable credit risk. Despite the tough market conditions recently, we remain very constructive on the MBS market and its potential as we move towards the end of the Fed's tightening cycle. We continue to assess share repurchases when we trade significantly below book value. We have increased our authorized repurchase authority effective next week As always, we need to balance the value in historically cheap MBS against the accretion available from below-book stock-free purchases, as well as liquidity on the balance sheet. In response to the increased market volatility, Armour took measured steps towards a more conservative portfolio risk profile in order to safeguard our capital in this turbulent environment. These steps included a 25% reduction of our agency CMBS dust positions, We've long valued how our DUS allocation bolsters both the convexity and the diversification of our agency MBS portfolio. While we acknowledge DUS spreads are at recent wides, we execute these trades due to DUS outperformance versus MBS pools in the last two months. We sold lower coupon TBA position against our conventional seasoned loan balance pools to rotate into higher coupon JMA2 TBAs and pools, improving the duration profile of the portfolio through the shorter cash flows of Gini Collateral. Their explicit U.S. government guarantee gives these pools a 0% risk weighting on par with U.S. Treasuries and makes them particularly attractive to banks and overseas investors. This trade brought our overall exposure to the Gini 2 sector to 1.5 billion, or 16% of the total portfolio market value as of 10-24. We also sold four, four and a half, and 5% coupon TVAs and pools, These are shielded from supply by the FDIC and organic new mortgage issuers. These belly coupons have outperformed on a relative basis. We plan to eventually reinvest these proceeds into more attractive higher coupons with higher yields and wider spread characteristics. We rebalanced nearly all of our cleared short-duration swaps and treasury futures into 10-year SOPR swap hedges. This shifted negative duration to longer tenors, at a time when the 210 spread was inverted by more than negative 100 basis points. We also added 700 million in 10-year treasury short positions. This timely strategic shift enhanced our portfolio's resilience to rising treasury yields and MBS duration extension while improving our liquidity. All in, these trades allowed our portfolio to be more flexible in the face of a less predictable market environment. The portfolio's implied leverage and duration currently sit at 7.9 times and 0.9 years, respectively. We expect selling pressures to begin to subside, and this risk profile should benefit from even a modest improvement in current market conditions. Additionally, Armour maintains healthy levels of available liquidity. Despite seasonal effects driving CPRs marginally higher, the overall mortgage refinancing activity remains at historically low prepayment levels. Armour's average prepayment rate for all MBS assets in the third quarter was 5.3 CPR and a still very low 4.2 CPR in October. With our assets now priced on average seven to nine points below par, any prepayment activity in the portfolio is accretive to book value and is welcome to current prices. Armour continues to fund just over 50% of its borrowings through our broker-dealer affiliate, Buckley Securities, with repo generally priced around SOFR plus 15 basis points. In late August, prior to most of the negative price action, Armour gave guidance that we intended to maintain the same 40 cents per common share monthly dividend through the fourth quarter. The company followed through by declaring common dividends for October, November, and December on October 3rd. The resulting dividend rate is extremely high for conditions today, a level beyond what can be earned with reasonable risk. We're committed to paying the previously announced Q4 dividends. We will also be carefully considering market conditions and outlooks through the remainder of the fourth quarter. We expect to provide guidance on future dividends in late December, which will reflect the company's best assessment for the intermediate term at that time. That concludes my remarks.

Drew, do we have any questions from people on the line? Yes, we will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Trevor Cranston with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Good morning. Can you guys talk about how you're thinking about the interest rates market and specifically, you know, the risk of 10-year yields continuing to rise? And if we were to see that scenario as generally, how do you think we'd see MBS perform in that backdrop? Thanks.

So good morning. We have reduced our exposure to DVO1s at the dollar value of a one basis point move in rates considerably from where it was four to five months ago. On the long end, as Scott said in his statement, our exposure on the short end is greater than on the long end, such that if you have a steepener in a bear market, meaning the 10-year rates go up, we are in a better position than we would have been on the first day of the third quarter. Mortgages are in an interesting place here because we are seeing fund redemptions. It is something we haven't experienced or talked about in a decade. The last time I talked about that was 2008, 9, 10. And fund redemptions are without regard to the value of mortgage-backed securities. It's usually the large... money management houses that run these funds, people redeem and they have to sell. So until fund redemptions stop, we imagine that mortgages are going to be fairly flat to even perhaps a little wider. However, there will be a point at which fund redemptions will slow down. And at that point, we don't know who the sellers would be of mortgages. And on the margin, there would likely be buyers. So our perspective on mortgages, while we thought at the end of the second quarter they were exceedingly attractive, they are exceedingly more attractive today. We are a levered bond portfolio. We intend to continue to be a levered mortgage-backed agency security bond portfolio. But we are cognizant that the risks are out there. However, Trevor, we think they're less than perhaps what they were four to six weeks ago. I hope that addresses your question. And if not, come back with a follow-up.

No, yeah, that was very helpful. And I guess one more. So, you know, as you guys are thinking about the appropriate dividend level heading into the end of the year, could you just comment sort of generally on where you see ROEs on new capital deployments today at the leverage levels you're comfortable with? Thanks.

Hey, Trevor, it's Mark. So we see leverage returns in MBS somewhere in the mid-teens. And that's even before you add the hedges, which are going to be positive carry based on the inverted yield curve, which could add another 500 basis points in some cases. So mid-teens is where we see current opportunities.

And that would be on a leverage of approximately eight times and hedge to a duration of 0.5 to one area. So that's deliverable. And You know, frankly, if you wanted to raise your number from eight to nine on the leverage, you know, it increases it by probably another 150 basis points. So, you know, there are opportunities out there. But as I said in my comments a minute ago, we continue to be cognizant of the downside. And Mark has his team's leverage just under eight right now. And Matt will stick around that area for a while until we see clear skies. Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. Thank you.

The next question comes from Matthew Erdner with Jones Trading. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning guys. Thanks for taking the question. You said until redemption stop, mortgage spreads will kind of be flat to a little bit wider. Are you guys waiting for the money managers to kind of come back in for spreads to tighten or what other catalysts do you think could bring those spreads in?

So eventually, Mortgages are going to be so attractive versus other places where funds can be invested that you're going to see buyers come in. And this is why Mark and his team increased their exposure to the Jenny Mae sector to almost a billion, billion and a half dollars right now. We know banks are going to be more interested in buying Jenny Mae's. And we know that. the convexity features of mortgages when they have way lower dollar prices. So, I mean, even six and a halves are well below par right now. So these are going to have interest to investors. You just have to wait out bear markets and that's what we're doing.

Mark, you want to prove on that? Yeah. When we see, start to see banks and money managers come back in and banks are going to be the biggest, biggest player. I think that's going to drive spreads in when, you know, loan growth and deposit growth go in better directions for security purchases, that's when we'll start to see things tighten.

Gotcha. Thank you.

The next question comes from Christopher Nolan with Ladenburg-Thalman. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. On the capital management front, I know you have not issued stock quarter to date, but have you repurchased any shares?

At the point we wanted to repurchase, we were in a blackout period. So the answer is we've not repurchased any to date. Jim Mountain was very explicit in his comments, though, that blackout ends on Monday and the board authority has increased our ability to repurchase shares. So we will be considering that. But take note of what Scott said as well, if you would, please. So there's three things you have to think about. Number one, we're always thinking about liquidity, and our liquidity is quite good right now. So that would enable us on the margin to repurchase shares. Then we balance the use of that capital versus where Mark and his team could invest money. And they model it out, and they decide what is the best use of capital.

Great. And then on leverage, where are you thinking about taking leverage forward? It looks fairly flat quarter to date relative to September 30th. But given everything you have been discussing, it sounds like you want to be in a more defensive posture. Just trying to understand where you think leverage might go.

So leverage for us, we have to balance the fact that we still see so much volatility going forward. And we don't want to get over our skis and have to force to sell assets because our leverage gets too high. We're trying to balance this. And as Scott said in his remarks, we did several trades in Q3 as things were selling off and our leverage was decreasing to decrease leverage and decrease risk. But we still want to have enough risk on when things turn, we are in a position that we can take advantage of that. So we want to have enough dry powder that we can withstand rates continuing to rise and spreads continuing to widen, but enough leverage on that when things go the other way, we are able to take that advantage and see the increase in book value.

But as I noted earlier, go ahead, please. No, no, please go ahead, please. As I noted earlier, we're at 7.9 right now. I doubt you would see us getting much over 8 in the current environment.

Great. Final question. Reason for the decline in net interest income quarter over quarter, given investment margins were relatively flat and your Agency volumes went up since last quarter. Is that a timing issue?

I think that is just a timing issue. I'd have to look at that a little harder. I don't know off the top of my head what the driver was there, but towards the end of the quarter, we did do a lot of selling, as we said, so we'll take a look. Great.

Okay. Thank you, guys.

Again, if you have a question, please press star, then 1. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jim Mountain for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining us this morning. We appreciate your interest in ARMA Residential REIT. And as always, if questions or concerns arise between now and the next time we do this in three months or so, please give us a call at the office. And in the meantime, stay safe.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.