Eagle Point Income Company Inc.

Today your conference will begin shortly. Thank you for joining us and your conference will begin shortly. Thank you. Thank you. Greetings. Welcome to Eagle Point Income Company's first quarter 2021 financial results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Garrett Edson of ICR. Garrett, you may begin.

Thank you, Rob, and good morning. Before we begin our formal remarks, we need to remind everyone that the matters discussed in this call include forward-looking statements or projected financial information that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those projected in such forward-looking statements and projected financial information. For further information on factors that could impact the company and the statements and projections contained herein, please refer to the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Each forward-looking statement and projection of financial information made during this call is based on information available to us as of the date of this call. We disclaim any obligation of data forward-looking statements unless required by law. A replay of this call can be accessed for 30 days via the company's website, www.eaglepointincome.com. Earlier today, we filed our first quarter 2021 financial statements and our first quarter investor presentation with Securities and Exchange Commission. Financial statements and our first quarter investor presentation are also available within the investor relations section of the company's website. Financial statements can be found by following the financial statements and reports link, and the investor presentation can be found by following the presentations and events link. I would now like to introduce Tom Bajewski, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Eagle Point Income Company.

Thank you, Garrett, and welcome everyone to Eagle Point Income Company's first quarter earnings call. We appreciate your interest in Eagle Point Income Company, or EIC. If you haven't done so already, we invite you to download our investor presentation from our website at eaglepointincome.com. I'll refer to several parts of that presentation during my remarks. For today's call, I'll provide a high-level commentary on some of our first quarter and recent portfolio activity, then we'll turn the call over to Ken, who will take us through the first quarter financial results. We'll then end with a question and answer session from any investors. Continuing our momentum from the second half of 2020, The company started 2021 with another solid quarter. Our portfolio is performing well and all of our holdings are current on their interest payments. We have no assets whatsoever on non-accrual. Net investment income for the quarter exceeded our distributions in the first quarter, and we also had some additional realized gains. Our NAV for the first quarter increased very modestly. In the broader market, Corporate default rates are falling rapidly, and the U.S. economy is growing at levels not seen in decades. Three-month LIBOR remains quite low at around 15 basis points, which, considering most CLO securities have a floor of zero, is nearly as low as it can functionally go for us. If and when LIBOR moves up, that increase will increase the earnings on our CLO debt portfolio, and everything in our portfolio is floating rate, and we believe that would then flow through to NII for the company. Our positive momentum accelerated in April. All the positions in our portfolio continued to pay current. And based on management estimates, April NAV increased by about 3% from the end of March. Due to our strong recent financial performance and our continued confidence in the company's future prospects, we were pleased to announce our second distribution increase last week. Beginning in July, our stock will now pay a monthly common distribution of $0.09 per share up from $0.085 a share that we paid during the second quarter. During the first four months of 2021, less than five companies defaulted on their loans, according to market data. The trailing 12-month default rate continues to fall and stood at 3.15% at the end of March. It declined further to about 2.61% at the end of April, which is below the long-term average default rate. It's truly an amazing turnaround from where we were just one year ago. Looking for signals related to future defaults, at the end of April 2021, only 1% of the loan market was trading below 80% of par. Below 80 prices are a common benchmark to evaluate loans that are stressed. While we still expect some defaults in the coming months, most dealer research desks are now forecasting a 2% to 3% default rate in 2021, down from earlier projections of 3% to 3.5%. As liquidity has been considerably strengthened for many borrowers and the economy grows at a rapid clip, we see a path to potentially more optimistic default outlook for the balance of the year. Put in other words, perhaps defaults will be even lower than the banks are suggesting. As long-term focused investors, we seek to construct our portfolio to manage through periods of dislocation, we believe we remain well positioned to generate solid cash flows and attractive returns for our investors. If the market continues to tighten, we have room for further appreciation in our portfolio as a fair number of our positions remain priced at discounts to par. So, if spreads tighten, those prices will go up. We continue to be optimistic with respect to deploying across attractive CLO junior debt and equity investments, and will realize gains when value can be optimized. We would also like to remind you that CLO debt has managed on multiple occasions, particularly CLO BB debt, to withstand the worst of economic cycles, experiencing low long-term default rates. While past performance is obviously not a guarantee of future results, we believe the performance of our portfolio throughout the pandemic has again validated CLO BB debt as an attractive and resilient asset class. I'll now turn the call over to Ken.