Eagle Point Income Company Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Eagle Point Income Company's fourth quarter and year-end 2021 financial results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Garrett Edson of ICR. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Stacey, and good morning. Before we begin our formal remarks, we need to remind everyone that the matters discussed on this call include forward-looking statements or projected financial information that involve risks and certainties 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 the 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 of protection 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 to update our 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 form NCSR, our full year 2021 audited financial statements, in our fourth quarter investor presentation with Securities and Exchange Commission. Our statements and our fourth 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 Majewski, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Eagle Point Income Company.

Great. Thank you, Garrett, and welcome everyone to Eagle Point Income Company's fourth 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, which I'll refer to in a portion of my remarks. The fourth quarter was another solid one for EIC, capping off really what was an excellent year for the company. Net investment income and realized gains for the fourth quarter, excluding non-recurring items, once again exceeded our common distributions. We raised our monthly common distribution three times during 2021, and given our strong performance and outlook for the investment portfolio, on the 14th, we announced another increase of 4% in our common distribution to 12.5 cents per common share beginning in the second quarter. Due to our strong performance during the year, we were also able to declare a special dividend of 20 cents per common share, which was paid earlier this year. We completed our first preferred stock offering and our first follow-on common stock offering during the fourth quarter. Combined, the company raised nearly $45 million of additional capital that we deployed into new CLO junior debt and certain CLO equity investments, and we believe this capital will help further increase our net investment income over time. Our NAV as of December 31st was $16.76 per share, which is a slight reduction from the end of 2020, due in large part to the one-time expenses from the offering and the special distribution. Excluding those events, we would have seen NAV increase for the year. Even with those unusual events factored in, we generated a gap return on equity of 7.96% during the year. The strategy we announced last summer to introduce long-term leverage to our balance sheet and tweak our portfolio mix by slightly increasing our allocation to CLO equity has helped the company increase its net investment income. As we continue to deploy capital at attractive levels, and with the potential for interest rates to rise meaningfully this year, we believe the company is positioned to do quite well. In the broader market, the U.S. economy is holding firm, though inflation and supply chain issues do continue to be present. We nearly certainly are soon to be in a rising rate environment, with many now forecasting multiple rate increases from the Fed this year. As LIBOR and SOFR move up, the earnings on our CLO debt portfolio is expected to increase as 100% of the CLO debt investments that we hold are floating rate. In short, we see multiple paths to continuing to generate additional net investment income for our portfolio. In terms of corporate loan defaults, Only five broadly syndicated loans defaulted in all of 2021, which is remarkable when compared to the 68 different loans that defaulted in 2020. As a result of this strong performance, the trailing 12-month default rate hit a near all-time low during the year, finishing 29 basis points at the end of December. We continue to believe that we're in the early stages of the next economic expansion, and we expect relatively few corporate defaults in the coming quarters. As long-term focused investors, we seek to construct our portfolio to manage through periods of volatility and dislocations. In strong markets like we're in right now, we focus on positioning our portfolio for the next downturn whenever it may occur. While we don't anticipate that happening anytime soon, we continue to try and lengthen the weighted average remaining reinvestment periods of our CLO debt and equity portfolios and maintain a prudent amount of unsecured term leverage in the company's capital structure. We would like to remind you that CLO BB debt has historically withstood multiple economic downturns, experiencing very low long-term default rates. While past performance is never a guarantee of future results, we believe the performance of our portfolio over the past couple of years has clearly validated CLO BB debt as a very attractive and resilient asset class. I'll now turn the call over to Ken, who will walk us through the financials in a little more detail.