Eagle Point Income Company Inc.

Good morning and welcome everyone to Eagle Point Income Company's fourth quarter earnings call. I will now turn the call over to Peter Escusa at ICR. Please begin.

Thank you and good morning. As a reminder, before we begin our formal remarks, the matters discussed in this call include forward-looking statements or projected financial information that involves 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 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 2023 audited financial statements, and our fourth-quarter investor presentation with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The financial statements and our fourth-quarter investor presentations are also available within the investor relations section of the company's website. The 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 will now turn over to Tom Majewski, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Eagle Point Income Company.

Thank you, Peter, 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. I'd like to start off by saying that the fourth quarter capped off a great 2023 for the company. We had another quarter-over-quarter increase in our portfolio cash flows. Our NAV increased and our net investment income, again, comfortably exceeded the monthly common distributions that we paid. Frankly, our portfolio is doing exactly what it's designed to do in an elevated rate environment, generate more cash for our shareholders. This all translates directly into strong returns for our shareholders. Our GAAP return on equity for 2023 was 25.93%, and the total return on our common stock, assuming reinvestment of distributions, was 21.37 percent for the year, good returns by any measure. Given our confidence in our portfolio and our overall outlook beginning last month, we increased our regular monthly common distribution by another 11 percent to 20 cents per share per month. This is the highest monthly common distribution per share in our history and represents our eighth increase since the beginning of 2021. Among our other highlights for the fourth quarter, our net investment income less than de minimis realized capital losses was $0.56 per share, which does exclude $0.02 per share of non-recurring expenses related to excise tax estimates. We received recurring cash flows of $9.3 million, or $0.91 per share, comfortably in excess of our regular common distributions and operating expenses. We paid three monthly common distributions of 18 cents per share during the fourth quarter, and as I mentioned before, increased our monthly common distribution by 11% to 20 cents per common share beginning in January. Our NAV as of December 31st was $14.39 per share, and this is an increase of 2% from September, and our NAV grew by 11% in total during the year. This is in addition to the cash distributions that we pay to our shareholders throughout the year. Along with our strong portfolio performance, we also opportunistically raised capital through our at-the-market program, issuing just over 1 million common shares at a premium to NAV, generating NAV accretion of $0.03 per share during the quarter. We also issued nearly 57,000 shares of our Series B term preferred stocks. Importantly, we believe our usage of the ATM program is helping to drive additional liquidity in our common shares. And indeed, our average daily trading volume in 2023 was more than double that measure in 2022. Additionally, the company had a number of meaningful subsequent events which we'd like to share. We've declared common distributions of 20 cents per share now through the end of June 2024. Since the end of 2023, We estimated our NAV at January month end to be between $14.94 and $15.04 per share, a further 4.2% increase at the midpoint from year end. And as of February 15th, we have over $26 million of cash and revolver borrowing capacity available to us, ample dry powder with which to invest as we further expand our portfolio. Our portfolio continues to benefit from the floating rate nature of CLOs. given that 100% of our CLO debt investments that we hold are floating rate. All of our CLO BBs have coupons that are in the double digits at this point, with some CLO BBs having the potential to yield north of 20% in early call scenarios. As long-term focused investors, we seek to construct our portfolio to weather multiple economic cycles, and our consistently strong performance with respect to cash flow and income is validation that we're executing on that playbook. We remain excited for our portfolio's potential as we start the new year. For additional commentary on the overall market and our recent portfolio activity, I'd like to turn the call over to Senior Principal and Portfolio Manager Dan Coe.