MFA Financial, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the MSA Financial First Quarter 2026 Financial Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow a 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. I would now like to turn the call over to Hal Schwartz, General Counsel, to begin. Thank you.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. The information discussed on this conference call today may contain or refer to forward-looking statements regarding MFA Financial Inc., which reflect management's beliefs, expectations, and assumptions as to MFA's future performance and operations. When used, statements that are not historical in nature, including those containing words such as will, believe, expect, anticipate, estimate, should, could, would, or similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made. These types of statements are subject to various known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors, including those described in MFA's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and other reports that it may file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These risks, uncertainties, and other factors could cause MFA's actual results to differ materially from those projected, expressed, or implied in any forward-looking statements it makes. For additional information regarding MFA's use of forward-looking statements, please see the relevant disclosure in the press release announcing MFA's first quarter 2026 results. Thank you for your time. I would now like to turn this call over to MFA's CEO, Craig Knudson.

Thank you, Hal. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us for MFA Financial's first quarter 2026 earnings call. With me today are Brian Wolfson, our President and Chief Investment Officer, Mike Roper, our Chief Financial Officer, and other members of our senior management team. I will offer some general remarks on the macro, economic, and political landscapes, and will then provide an update on MFA's business initiatives and portfolio activities. Then I'll turn the call over to Mike, followed by Brian, before we open up the call for questions. Moving to market conditions in the first quarter of 2026, it was very much a tale of two market environments. Fixed income markets began the year with a continuation of strong investor demand and low volatility that we experienced in the second half of 2025. The economy continued to exhibit resiliency, and the labor market seemed to stabilize, particularly with a surprisingly robust January nonfarm payroll print in early February. Mortgages performed particularly well, aided also by a directive for the GSEs to purchase $200 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities in early January. Unfortunately, the party ended abruptly with the onset of a war in Iran, which spiked volatility, pushed rates sharply higher, and dramatically raised oil prices. Higher energy prices renewed fears of inflation, and markets adjusted expectations for fewer or even no rate cuts later this year. Mortgage spreads widened significantly against this backdrop and contributed to an economic return for MFA in the first quarter of negative 1.2%. However, despite the market volatility and heightened geopolitical tension, markets remained open and orderly. We priced two non-QM securizations in March, and while spreads were modestly wider, the market functioned normally. This is a testament to the expansion, maturity, and depth of these markets over the last four years. The second of these two non-QM securizations was a re-lever of two previous deals, which is a good example of what we often refer to as an underappreciated source of optionality, that our ability to call these deals as they season and pay down, enabling us to lower borrowing costs and unlock additional capital. We grew our investment portfolio to $12.5 billion in the first quarter, adding almost $700 million of agencies, including TBAs, $471 million of non-QM loans, and Lima One originated $219 million of business purpose loans. Our asset management team continues to work diligently to resolve delinquent loans in the portfolio. This can be maddeningly time-consuming, but our team has been working out delinquent loans for over a decade, the majority of which were purchased as non-performing loans. And they're the best in the business at this and uniquely suited to the task. Finally, our listeners will recall that we began a program in the third quarter of last year to issue additional shares of our two outstanding preferred stock issues via an ATM. and use the proceeds to repurchase common shares at a significant discount to book. While this program is modest in size thus far, this is very accretive, and importantly, because we are issuing equity in the form of preferred stock, we are not shrinking our equity base, despite repurchasing common stock. Finally, we continue to pursue expense reductions, both at MFA and at Lima One, which Mike will discuss shortly. I will note that we have added an additional distributable earnings metric that we are introducing in response to requests from analysts and investors, distributable earnings prior to realized credit losses. And Mike will describe this in more detail shortly. We believe that this new DE metric offers a useful representation of how we think about the earnings power of the portfolio. And for those of you that follow commercial mortgage rates, this should be a very familiar concept. Taken together, MFA has a diversified business strategy that includes multiple attractive target asset classes with a robust ability to source these assets, a reliable and proven ability to obtain durable non-recourse leverage to generate attractive ROEs, a highly confident in-house asset management capability, a keen focus on expense management, and a demonstrated responsible capital issuance philosophy. And I'll now turn the call over to Mike to discuss our financial results. Thanks, Craig, and good morning, everyone.