Chegg, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the AG Mortgage Investment Trust Inc. Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. In order to ask a question during the session, please press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star, then zero. I'd now like to turn the call over to Ginny Neslin, General Counsel for the company. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the second quarter 2024 earnings call for AG Mortgage Investment Trust. With me on the call today are T.J. Durkin, our CEO and President, Nick Smith, our Chief Investment Officer, and Anthony Rossiello, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please note that the information discussed in today's call may contain forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made during today's call are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which are outlined in our SEC filings, including under the headings cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements, risk factors, and management discussion and analysis. The company's actual results may differ materially from these statements. We encourage you to read the disclosure regarding forward-looking statements contained in our SEC filings, including our most recently filed Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, and our subsequent reports filed from time to time with the SEC. Except as required by law, we are not obligated and do not intend to update or to review or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. During the call today, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our SEC filings for reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures. We will also reference the earnings presentation that was posted to our website this morning. To view the slide presentation, turn to our website, www.agmit.com, and click on the link for the Q2 2024 earnings presentation on the homepage. Again, welcome to the call, and thank you for joining us today. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to TJ.

Thank you, Jenny. I'm excited to report our second quarter financials, which show our continued execution of our core business strategy and the compelling benefits of our recent merger. Walking through MIT's financial position as of June 30th, we saw adjusted book value move modestly lower from 1058 to 1037, producing a roughly break-even economic return on equity for the quarter. with it being too early to give an estimate of July's book value. More notably, on June 13th, the Board voted unanimously to increase our dividend 5.6% to $0.19 per share. During the quarter, we earned $17.4 million of net interest income, negative $0.02 of earnings per share, and $0.21 of EAD per share, covering our newly set dividend previously declared by $0.02. One of the key areas of focus for us coming out of the WMC acquisition was efficiently addressing the impending maturity of their $86 million convertible notes due on September 15th, 2024. We were happy to report during the quarter we successfully issued another $65 million of investment-grade senior unsecured notes to more than cover the upcoming maturity when considering our $34.5 million issuance from Q1 of this year. Effectively replacing the convertible debt with these senior unsecured notes positions met with a materially more advantageous corporate debt structure going forward. As a result of these bond issuances, and to avoid holding excess cash, we have invested a portion of these proceeds into agency MBS using only modest leverage in order to generate strong short-term risk-adjusted returns. As a result, the company ended the quarter with $180 million of liquidity and moderately higher than normal leverage of 2.5 terms. We would anticipate post-retainment of the convertible notes at maturity in September, we will return to more historical levels of leverage at the company level. Since closing the WMC acquisition on December 6th of last year through quarter end, approximately $57 million of assets have already been monetized, returning $41 million of equity to be rotated into our core strategy of newly originated residential mortgage loans. One significant result of the merger is our inclusion into the Russell 2000 as of June 28th. We believe this is a critical step in both broadening our investor base and improving investor liquidity. Like I stated last quarter, the team and I are very excited to show the market the benefits we see in the power of the combined company. I'll now turn the call over to Nick.