Orchid Island Capital, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call for Orchid Island Capital. This call is being recorded today, February 26, 2021. At this time, the company would like to remind the listeners that statements made during today's conference call relating to matters that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Listeners are cautioned that such forward-looking statements are based on information currently available on the management's good faith, beliefs with respect to future events, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause such differences are described in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K. The company assumes no obligation to update such forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, changes in assumptions, or changes in other factors affecting forward-looking statements. Now, I would like to turn the conference over to the company's chairman and chief executive officer, Mr. Robert Colley. Please go ahead, sir.

Robert Colley, Chief Executive Officer, Orchid, Thank you, operator, and good morning. I hope everybody had a chance to download our flipbook, which we posted on our website last night. And as usual, I'll be going through the flipbook over the course of the call. I just want to start off by saying that Orchid had another very strong quarter of continued book value recovery from Q1 and strong earnings. We continue to pay a very attractive dividend that is covered by earnings, which in turn allows our stock to trade at or above book value, which it has for several months now. And again, this in turn allows us to opportunistically raise capital by either our ATM or our secondary whenever opportunities in the market present themselves. This, of course, gives us a chance to enhance the earnings power of the company. With respect to the slide deck, we do maintain the majority of the slides from quarter to quarter. depending on the quarter. Some are more relevant than others, given that we're kind of late into February. I will be skimming over some, especially the ones on the market focus slides. And then also, given the significant changes in the market, especially over the last two weeks, I will spend some time going over steps that we've taken with the portfolio since year end. With that, I'll just go over the slide deck now. As usual, we'll start off by giving you the highlights for the quarter of our results. As I said, we'll go through the market developments relatively quickly, discuss our financial results, and then spend the most of the time talking about the portfolio, our hedged positions, and changes made to both over the course of both the fourth quarter and year-to-date. With that, on slide four, Orchid reported income per share of $0.23. This is net earnings per share of $0.30, excluding realized and unrealized gains and losses on our RMBS asset and derivative instruments, including net interest expense on interest rate swaps. We had a loss of $0.07 per share from these realized and unrealized gains on our RMBS and derivative instruments, including, again, net interest expense on the swaps. Book value per share was $5.46 at the end of the year, an increase of 2 cents or 0.37% from the ending value at the end of the third quarter of 544. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company declared and subsequently paid 19.5 cents per share in dividends. And since our initial public offering, the company has declared $11.78.5 in dividends, including dividends declared in the first two months of this year. So, economic return of 21.5 cents per share or 4% for the quarter, which is 15.8% annualized. Turning to slides five and six, this is where we present our results versus our peer group. Our peer group is, of course, listed at the bottom of each page. On the first slide, we show the performance calculated on a total return basis using change in the stock price and dividends. and on the second page using book value. Because we are doing this before all the results are in for the fourth quarter, book value numbers are not available for all of the peer groups, so the second slide is only through the third quarter. But as you can see, again, ORCA has had very strong performance versus the peer group. In each case, we're looking back either one through seven-year period and then the actual calendar years. And ORCID continues to generate very attractive returns for our shareholders. Turning now to the market developments, which, again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on, given how late we are in the first quarter and what's happened so far. On the left side, you can just see the changes in the Treasury curve. The blue line represents the curve at the end of the third quarter, the red line the end of the year, and the green line is as of last Friday. Even since last Friday, the market has moved quite a bit. But just to focus on the fourth quarter for a moment, over the course of the quarter, rates did move higher. For instance, the 10-year Treasury moved from just below 70 basis points to over 90. And this is pretty much driven by the recovery with respect to the vaccine, not so much COVID cases, because as we all know, COVID cases in the fourth quarter were starting to rise very dramatically. But we did get the announcement of a vaccine during the quarter. and the market started to price in a modest recovery. Obviously, that's changed in Q1. But also, it's important to note with respect to a mortgage investor that the spread between the primary rates available to borrowers and the implied current coupon on a mortgage, what we call a primary-secondary spread, did continue to contract in Q4. So prepayments were still very, very fast in the quarter and really showed no meaningful sign of slowing on a seasonal basis like we would typically see. The second side just shows the same thing with respect to swap, the swap curve. And just a brief comment on what we've seen this quarter, obviously with the economic data, developments with respect to vaccines, and the drop in COVID cases, all of these have improved very dramatically in a very short period of time. And not surprisingly, rates have followed suit, especially again in the last two weeks. And so what we're really seeing is the normalization process of both the economy and the rates market are moving very rapidly. And based on comments from the Fed chair this week, it seems that the Fed chair is comfortable with these moves. They view them as the market reassessing the economy and pricing and recovery, which is something they very much like to see, in addition to raising inflation expectations. Although yesterday was a little bit different. Yesterday, we saw the curve move and I think it remains to be seen the level of comfort the Fed has with that. But that's probably more of a conversation for the first quarter earnings call than today. The subsequent slides just show the change in the 10-year rate over both the quarter and for swaps and going back. Two years, as you can see, the change in the fourth quarter was very modest. We ended the quarter just over 90, but we were over 150 yesterday. So, obviously, the market has continued to sell off and price in a recovery in very dramatic fashion. Slide 10, I think, is very telling. What we show on the bottom of this slide, this green line, is the slope of the 530s curve. And this is basically a proxy for the slope of the curve. And as you can see, going back to 2013, we entered into a very long flattening period, which has changed dramatically over the last couple of years, and especially 2020 and early 2021. Interestingly, yesterday, this actually reversed, and it's continued to reverse slightly today. So this 530 spread actually got north of the level here of 155, actually got into the 160s. but it's since come back to about 15 basis points or so just in the last, not even two days. Another telling slide is slide 11, just to go to show you how much things have changed in this quarter. As you can see, in the fourth quarter, mortgage prices were fairly stable. Higher coupon mortgages did well as the market really anticipated potential burnout in the case of the higher coupons. We've seen some of that to date, maybe not as much as the market expected. And, of course, lower coupons were supported by Fed purchases, which continue ongoing. Just to give you some points of reference, if you can see on the top left, we show TBA prices over the course of the fourth quarter. If you look at the bottom line, that's the price of a Fannie Two. As you can see, at the end of the year, it was pushing up against 104. Yesterday, those bonds traded below par. So, obviously, a very significant move. The red line are Fannie 2.5. They were a mid $105 price. Yesterday, they had a 102 handle. And ironically, the top line, Fannie 4s, which were a high $106 price at the end of the year, actually have traded up in price since year end, again, reflecting the desire for higher coupon securities. With respect to the low market, the story really hasn't changed. The levels have changed somewhat. Higher coupons tend to trade with flat or negative drops, and the lower coupons have attractive drops, although that has been changing slightly lately. On the right side of the page, we see spec prices. Obviously, they've been very, very strong. We'll have more to say about that a little later. It remains to be seen what these levels are given the moves in the last two weeks. Next week, we have the auction cycles. we should be able to get a good picture on where things are. The last week, especially the last two days, we've had very limited color with respect to spec pricing. I think just given the magnitude of the markets moving such a short period of time, there just hasn't been enough training to flesh that out. The next slide is implied vol, which is obviously very important for mortgage investors. As you can see, last year in March, we had a huge spike And then it was very, very subdued to the balance of the year. Yesterday, we were in the mid to high 80s. So we've spiked again, not quite as dramatically as last March, but again, a very big move in a short period of time. These next few slides, I can go over fairly quickly. One thing that's interesting to note here on the page 13, these LIBOR OESs for TBAs, as you can see, they had tightened somewhat in the fourth quarter, and that continued to be the case early in the first quarter of 2021. So even though mortgages cheapened quite a bit in the last few days, keep in mind that this is after tightening to multi-year tights earlier in the quarter. So they were really just coming from a very tight level. And so we're really just getting back to what you might call fair values. So this is nothing like, say, for instance, the taper tantrum where mortgages got exceptionally cheap. We're really just getting back into more fair-based ranges, I would say, price range. Slide 14, this is, again, kind of more last year's news. As you can see, in the fourth quarter, risk assets had an extremely strong quarter. Of course, we all know that stock markets continue to make new highs, or were doing so. And that was reflected in the bottom side, which you see the year-to-date returns. And again, risky assets, whether it's high yield or emerging market high yield or the S&P, were very strong. And lower-risk assets, after having a very strong first quarter, have actually kind of trailed, not surprisingly. Slide 15, I think this is very relevant for us in today's discussion. On the top left-hand side, you see the red line there, which is the mortgage rate available to borrowers. than the level of the refi index. And as you can see, the level of rates to borrowers continue to drop all year. It got down as low as 280, and depending on your source, could have even been below that. Many cases were. The refi index was very high, around 4,000. It actually got as high as 4,500 earlier this year. Never quite as high as we've seen in the past, but still very strong steady level of refinancing. We all, of course, know how strong the housing market is. Over the course of just the last few weeks, though, this red line is a reverse course, and it's probably over 3% today. Last week, or this week, actually, the refining next dropped a little over 10%. It's below 4,000. And I would assume that these rates hold. That will continue to drop. One important note, one of the large production coupons is the 2.5% 30-year mortgage rate. And we're kind of just past the point where they went no longer 50 basis points in the money, depending, of course, on the gross whack. So now that coupon is probably not so refinanceable. And that's a meaningful development for a coupon stack. On the right-hand side, you see the primary-secondary spread. As you can see, by year-end, it was around 150. That continued to compress into the first quarter. Depending on the items you look at to calculate that, we use the Freddie Mac survey rate versus the implied yield on a current coupon mortgage. That got much closer to 1% earlier this quarter, and now it's started to move up with rates pretty much basis point for basis point. Bottom side, so it's just the refinanceability of the mortgage universe. obviously that could continue to change, especially given that we've had a lot of 1.5%, 2%, and 2.5% mortgages originated in 2020 and early 21. So if 10-year rates move immediately above 150, a lot of that portion of the mortgage universe will no longer be refinanceable. Now, with respect to our financial results on slide 17, the left-hand side, we just basically decompose the numbers, which we talked about at the top of the slide deck, where we break out our earnings absent mark-to-market gains and losses. And this just provides the detail. On the right-hand side, we show the returns by sector in terms of how we allocate capital. And given what happened in the first or the fourth quarter, mortgages, in spite of the rates moving slightly higher, continued to tighten throughout the quarter, and the pass-through portfolio did quite well. Given how high speeds were and the compression of the primary-secondary spread, interest-only securities actually had a negative return for the quarter. That is not the case in the first quarter. This year, as you would expect, those numbers have reversed, and IOS flew quite well. Just a few more historical slides before we get into the media presentation. On slide 18, we just show our dividend history and the NIM as we report it, just kind of focusing on the last four quarters. As you can see, the blue line there at the top of the page just represents the yield on our average assets. And, of course, it's been declining. The red line is our funding costs, which has also been declining. A net of that is the green line, which shows that our NIM has actually expanded modestly. over this four-quarter period and seems to have dropped. If you look at the dividend, you see it more or less mirrors that. The dividend got as low as 5.5 cents briefly earlier in 2020 and has since recovered. It remains to be seen what we'll see for the balance of 2021. But to the extent you have rates remaining higher and curves steeper, as long as funding stays low, which I would think is a reasonable bet for the balance of the year, it should be a very attractive earnings environment for agency REITs for the balance of 2021. Slide 19 is just our earnings per share. 20 just shows you the allocation with capital. I will just mention briefly on the left-hand side, you can see the allocation to passage has been very high and trending higher for several years now. We're just starting to reverse that ever so slightly and add some more IO exposure. And that, I think, just reflects the changing nature of the investment environment we're in. With respect to the right side, you can see that the portfolio grew somewhat. As I mentioned, we've been able to opportunistically add capital either to the ATM in the case of the fourth quarter or to a secondary earlier this quarter, and the company continues to grow slightly. And now, really, just turning to the What we've done in the portfolio, first of all, with respect to the fourth quarter, as I mentioned, we had two primary developments that drove decision-making. On the one hand, you had rates moving slightly higher, and you could see with the introduction of a vaccine that it was likely to continue. But you also saw a compression of the primary-secondary spread, which was keeping refinancing activity quite high. And what we did, if you look on slide 22, the portfolio looks so much different than what we saw at the end of the third quarter. Basically, what we were doing is we're going down in coupon out of higher coupon, very high quality specs, into lower coupon, lower quality specs. Basically, the reason being that over the course of the quarter, really into the first quarter of this year, what we saw is that the The payout premiums for all specs were rising rapidly, but also the highest quality were very, very high. And given that rates were backing up and there's a lot of duration in those premiums, we were trying to reduce the portfolio's exposure to those. But we were also able to do so by going into lower coupons, keep prepayment levels very, very low. And we spoke at the top of the call about the earnings power of the portfolio. And it's been very strong for quite some time now. And we were able to keep it so by doing these trades. So we were kind of reducing our exposure to very high pay-up premium TV spec pulls. We also added some TVA dollar rolls to capture some income that way. And then we also started to change our hedges slightly. We added some shorts, TBA shorts and a 3% coupon. So that was both did very well for us in the quarter. I'll come back to what we did in the first quarter in a moment. In the meantime, I just want to talk, move through the balance of the slides. Slide 23 shows you this one slide that was very topical last year. It shows our allocation in the case of the red line to very high quality specs. And as you can see, it started to come down over the course of the year and has continued to do so into 2021 as we do what I just mentioned with respect to the change in coupons, but also with the increase in rates. We also expect that the refi index would start to come off. That being said, on slide 24, as you can see, these are our prepays over the fourth quarter and the last four quarters versus the cohorts. And since the portfolio has now focused more on high-quality specs versus TBAs, security selection was obviously very important and critical for us to maintain the earnings part of the portfolio. And we're very happy to say that we've done so quite well over the course of the year. And it's allowed us to continue to earn the dividend, the very attractive dividend. So you can see here, The prepays for each of the months of the fourth quarter were well below cohort speeds. And looking on the bottom right, you can see have been so for some time. But the way that we achieve that now is just changing. Slide 25 just shows you a level of the 10-year versus our prepays. This little green line that we show on the chart, this is basically a very simple calculation. We just divide the dollar amount of prepays by the unpaid principal balance of the portfolio. And as you can see, over the course of 2020, when we had rates at the lowest levels ever, we were able to keep our refis quite low through our security selection. In fact, it was even lower than in late 2019. The leverage ratio for the quarter was relatively flat around in the high eights. And then finally, with respect to our hedges, we continue to add to hedges over the course of the fourth quarter and into the first quarter, less so with respect to swaps, more with insurance would have a higher auction component. So you see on the top right-hand side of the page, you see the payer spreads, which we've added, and we continue to focus our hedging strategies in that area. And also, we did, and I'll get to this in a moment, we did make some changes to the swap book. The balance of the hedging, other than the small positions in Euro dollars and five-year futures, was in TBAs. So now I'd like to spend a few moments to talk about this quarter, given the moving rates. I'm sure that's very topical in everyone's mind, given the magnitude of the move. So obviously, a lot's changed, especially in the last two weeks. So what we've done with respect to the asset side of the portfolio is basically shed all of our very low coupon securities. We no longer have any 30-year exposure to any coupon less than 2.5. We've changed the maturity profile. We've reduced our exposure to 30 years by about $250 million. increased our exposure to 20 years by $300 million and 15 years by $250 million. We no longer have any TBA longs. In fact, we've increased the shorts. Now our shorts in 3% coupon are over $500 million, and we've actually added some shorts in 30 or 2.5%. Over the course of the month, the leverage ratio has gone slightly to about 8.5%. we view this as kind of a transitory step just to kind of wait out the correction in the rates market and actually as a consequence of the tba shorts which we've added inclusive of those our economic leverage ratio is down to 6.6 although i have to point out that the bulk of the tba shorts are in the three percent coupon and the drop there is actually negative so there's the cost of shorting those is actually the opposite. It's actually a mild positive. There is, of course, a cost on the shorts of 2.5% coupon. But given the fact that while that might be an increased cost and a drag on the portfolio with speeds slowing and probably expected to slow further, I think a net of those two will be negligible. And then finally, we have done some trading with respect to Adding to the I.O. book, we sold some of our fixed-rate CMOs that were front sequentials. We were able to take back an inverse I.O. off of that. It's a very short cash flow, so we think we have minimal exposure to Fed hiking, but we get to retain the most attractive component of that security, which is the I.O. component, which we probably expected to do quite well as rates move higher. With respect to hedges, we've also made some changes. Our swaps, we did two things with the swap book. We restruck those. Now we have a weighted average strike of 0.53% versus 1.14%. And we extended the maturities from four on average to five. We also mentioned we have a lot of exposure to option-based instruments, and we've restruck those to higher strikes. so that they offer us better protection in the event of rates continuing to increase and less downside exposure if we rally back. And then finally, we've added a few other trades, which I won't spend too much time detail-wise, but these are what we call conditional flattener trades. These are trades that are kind of more forward-looking. in anticipation of a normalization of the rates market and eventually the market pricing in, Fed hikes. This is a trade that will protect the portfolio from a meaningful flattening of the curve, which, of course, would put downward pressure on our NIM and upward pressure on our funding costs. So we put those trades on at attractive levels. And, of course, we monitor all of our hedges just to make sure that they're struck or the levels that we have them on are most effective levels to protect the portfolio. So, basically, with that, that's about it. I've kind of gone through everything with respect to the portfolio, both in 2014 or 2044, and also according to date. And I think with that, operator, we can open up the call to questions.

At this time, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Jason Stewart with Jones Trading. Your line is open.