Orchid Island Capital, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the third quarter 2022 earnings conference call for Orchid Island Capital. This call is being recorded today, October 28, 2022. 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, belief with respect to future events, and are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from these 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 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 Cawley. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Hopefully you've received the deck that we put on our website last night. As always, I'll be walking through that. And then at the end, we'll have a question and answer session. Just to start on slide three, just to kind of give you an overview of the agenda. As always, I will start with the highlights, our financial highlights for the quarter. Then I'll talk about market developments, which kind of drove those results. I'll then go through our financial results in detail and spend some time talking about the current portfolio hedges and so forth and what we did during the quarter. And then finally, I am going to provide a financial conditions update, if you will, just to update everybody in terms of all of the aspects of our liquidity and borrowing capacity and so forth, both for the quarter and as we sit here today. So with that, on to our financial highlights for the quarter. We had a net loss per share of $2.40, net earnings per share of 26 cents, excluding realized and unrealized gains and losses on our RMBS and derivative instruments. which includes net interest income on interest rate swaps. We had a loss of $2.66 per share from net realized and unrealized losses on the same RMBS assets and derivative instruments, including an interest expense on our interest rate swaps. Our book value per share was $11.42 as of September 30th versus $14.36 at June 30th. In Q3, the company declared itself to be paid 54.5 cents per share in dividends. And since its initial public offering, the company has declared $64.33 in dividends per share, including the dividends declared this past month. Total economic loss of $2.40, or 16.7% for the quarter. And on October 30th, the company affected a one-for-five reverse stock split. All share and per share numbers have been retroactively adjusted to reflect this in all of the slides on the deck today. Now, just to go through the... The market that we've been operating in, as you can see on slide six, this story has been the case now for some time. If you look at these lines on either the left side or the right side, the red line there is either the Treasury curve or the forward or swap curve. As of June 30th, the green line is the same curve as of 930, and then the blue line is the one as of last Friday. And the development that you just continue to see is the front end of the curve keeps rising as the market continues to price in not only higher Fed increases, but bringing those increases forward. The market expects the Fed to raise rates 75 basis points next week and either 50 or 75 again in December and likely a few more hikes, although probably smaller in size in 2023. And so that trend just continues as we move through time this year as the Fed, especially in Q3, and we'll talk about this more in a minute, has become extremely aggressive and hawkish in their desire to not only raise rates into restrictive territory, but to do so as soon as possible. If you look at slide 7, and I don't need to spend a lot of time on a lot of these slides. You are all familiar with the story, but this is just inconvenient pictures. As you can see, with respect to the 10-year or the 10-year sulfur swap, Really starting right at the end of July, a meaningful shift. The 10-year was at 260. 10-year sulfur swap is inside of 240. And it got over 4%. Since the last data point here, it's come off a little bit. But both of these numbers got well over 4%. So a very meaningful shift in a short period of time. And if you look over a much longer period on the right, you can see the same thing. These all reflect the steps that the Fed talked really starting about mid-August when they pushed back very hard against the notion that was being priced in the market at the time that the Fed was going to contain inflation and by sometime in early 2023 start to ease. And they've made it abundantly clear that's not the case, that they're going to do everything they can to contain inflation and raise rates as much as needed as soon as possible. If you look at page eight, you can see... not just, I'm sorry, got ahead of myself. That's right, page eight. You can see the effect on the mortgage market. There's two slides here. On the top, you see the most recent data just going back one year, but on the bottom, we try to give you some historical perspective. And you can see the spread of the current coupon to the 10-year treasury. There are many measures to use, to look at, to get a sense of the relative value of mortgages. This is just one, but it is representative. And as you can see, especially on the bottom chart, the spread of the current coupon mortgage to the 10-year treasury, really starting in 2013 through the onset of the pandemic, was very stable, trading in the high 80s for the most part. In March of 2020, that number spiked out quite a bit. But really, this year, it's gone much higher. We peaked at about 190 recently. And as we sit here today, as of last Friday, it was 183 basis points. So obviously, Mortgages have done very poorly, but really it's just all risk assets. We'll say something about that in a moment. But obviously it's been a very tough period for mortgages, particularly the third quarter. Slide 9 just gives you another perspective on the market. The takeaway here is that the curve is obviously very inverted. If you look at the bottom, you're just looking at the spread between the 5 and the 30-year treasuries. You can see we're fairly negative here. And also it's interesting to note that's occurring at the same time that both the yield on the 5-year and the 30-year are at basically the highest level they've been in 10 years. So obviously these are not normal times versus what we've been accustomed to of late. One last slide here, just really something to keep in mind on slide 19. These are just holdings by the Fed and by commercial banks. This is something to keep an eye on over time as we enter quantitative tightening And reserves are drained from the system. Both of these lines will draw down. The question is how far and at what rate. Really not much to say other than just to keep an eye on that. Now turning more specifically to the mortgage market on slide 11. The top left, I think, is very telling. If you look at this, what we're showing here are the price of four representative coupons in the fixed income or in the mortgage universe. Fannie, 30 or 3s, 4s, 5s, and 6s. And what you can see is these are normalized, so taking the price of the given coupon as of 630, setting that to 100, and then looking at how it performed over the course, not just of the quarter, but into October. It's interesting, when you look back to late July and early August, that's when the market thought the Fed was going to pivot in early 2023, and mortgages were doing very, very well. and especially lower coupon longer duration mortgages and they outperformed meaningfully. In fact, higher coupons were doing fairly poorly simply because they're going to be subject to faster prepays and the convexity would rear its ugly head. As the Fed pivoted and all of a sudden rates start going the other way, then everything flip-flops and you see that sixes did very, very well. They're short duration, makes sense. and the lower coupons did poorly. And there's also the specter of banks selling or banks of Japan selling. And so that performance turned around very meaningfully. But I know this is a very useful chart because at some point when the Fed ultimately does pivot, I think what you see on the left side of this page is what you're likely to see. And so it's kind of a microcosm of how the mortgage market is going to perform over the course of the next year or so. Basically, when rates are continuing to rise, what you see on the right side is likely to prevail. And to the extent the Fed pivots and we rally, what you see on the left side is what you're likely to see happen. The rest of the slides, bottom left, I'll just go through these quickly. These are the roles. I would like to give you data on the current production coupons, like fives and five-and-a-halfs and sixes and six-and-a-halfs. But we just don't have enough data. They're just new because rates have sold off so fast. And even though these coupons are now the quote-unquote current coupon, they haven't been so for long enough that we have any data. In fact, if you look at the top right where we see pay-ups for certain specified pulls, we have added fives and sixes, but we only have a very little amount of data. So as we move through time, that will come in. In the meantime, just to note, with most of the market trading at a discount, the need for call protection that are offered by specified polls really just isn't there. And as you would expect, those pay-ups are very subdued. Now another story on slide 12. This is very important. This is basically our proxy for volatility in the market. And as you can see, for instance, on the left side, back in March of 2020, volatility spiked up very, very high. But in fact, if you look at what's happened in the current year, it's even higher and more importantly if you look really what happened starting early in the year when vols started to increase it's just been a steady rise and it's risen pretty much all year and it really hasn't abated that much and that really is just a makes for a very challenging market for mortgages because you know in the most rudimentary sense when you own a mortgage you are short a prepayment option or short volatility so obviously if you're shorting volatility and it's rising throughout the year, that's not a good thing. As a solely agency mortgage investor, we're just subject to that pain and there's really nothing we can do. Going through the next few slides on the market, slide 13, limited information here. These are just OAS numbers on a bunch of coupons. Unfortunately, again, the more recent production coupons, fives and higher, there just isn't any data, so we really can't show much there. And the other one is just payoffs, which of course are extremely depressed on the right side. On slide 14, this just gives you an overview of basically how all the asset classes are performed. And I think the most important takeaway here is that historically, high-risk sectors of the market like equities tend to be inversely correlated with extremely low-risk sectors of the markets like treasuries. And of course, that has not been the case this year. As you can see, whether you look at Q3 alone or the year-to-date numbers, all the high-risk sectors of the market, especially equities, have negative returns, but so do treasuries. And so all risk assets in this environment are suffering meaningfully. Just on slide 15, this is new. Basically, this captures basically the entirety of the domestic fixed income universe, so everything from investment-grade corporates down to double B-rated CLOs and CRT bonds, and everything in between. Just point your attention, one of the first columns on the left says current, so that's the current spread, and this is as of 9.30. If you look over to the right, there's one that shows the 2022 highs, and then where we are at 9.30 versus that, and a zero basically tells you that we are at the high spread. And as you can see, pretty much the entire universe, is either at or very close to the widest spread that we've seen over the course of the year and, in fact, many years. So, obviously, all sectors of the fixed income market are suffering in this type of environment. Finally, one more page on the market before I talk about our results. If you look on the top left, as you can see, the red line there is the mortgage rate. It, in fact, did pass 7% this week. And the refi index, every week that it comes out of late, it makes a fresh multi-decade low. And if you look at the bottom, you can see the percent of the universe that's refinanceable, which is the shaded area, is effectively zero. And the refi index, as I said, just keeps dropping. The primary sector secondary spread has just been choppy that reflects the volatility in the market generally. And really what originators are dealing with now is what to do with headcount and capacity because obviously this market is very, very bad for the housing market as a whole. Now we can talk about our financial results. I want to spend a fair amount of time on slide 18. We have this slide every quarter. And if you look on the left-hand side, this is a very simple disaggregation of our income statement. So on the first column, basically you see all of our components of interest, income, and expense. and then the expenses we incur for the quarter, and then the middle column are all of our realized and unrealized gains and losses. So just to talk about the middle column for the moment, as you can see, we had a book value decline, and it's all reflected in the fact that the realized and unrealized gains or losses on the mortgage portfolio far exceeded the gains on our hedges, and that's what led to the book value decline. So obviously that's an artifact of what we just discussed, Now if you look at the first column, I want to point out a couple of things. So first we show our interest income. We use the fair value option of accounting. So basically what we do is we take the coupon times the par, and that's the dollar amount. The interest expense is what we pay on our repo. We do use hedge accounting for tax purposes, but not for GAAP. So we don't reflect that in this number. And then of course we have our expenses, and then we have an interest income of a little over $9 million. which is 26 cents. Now, that's 26 cents. We paid a dividend of 54.5 cents. So I need to point out two things. One, as I said, we don't use hedge accounting, but we do hedge. We have a number of hedges. We'll talk about that more in a moment. But those hedges are very much in the money. We're paying fixed or receiving floating in the case of swaps or on our futures and our swaptions. And so as those hedges have become very much in the money, net to us we are receiving cash flows, and the cash flows attributable to the third quarter of 2022 was about $5.043 million to us. That's 14.3 cents, which again is not reflected in this table because we don't use hedge accounting. Also, our portfolio, which we have pay downs on, has a weighted average price under 90, so significant discount. And so as we do get paid out, we get paid back at par, we have discount accretion. And even though prepayments are low, the magnitude of the discount is extremely high. So the accretion of discount for the quarter was $4,647,000, which is 13.2 cents. So for the quarter, the benefit of our hedges, if you look at this, say, in an economic sense, not just a GAAP reporting sense, the effect of the hedges was another 14.3 cents. The discount accretion was another 13.2 cents. The two total 27.5 cents, which when you add that to the 26 cents we reflect here, gets you to 53.5 cents. So our economic income for the quarter was one penny less than the dividend. So I just wanted to bring that to everybody's attention because this is where the shortcomings with our GAAP accounting can lead to some confusing outcomes. And it's always been the case that we present it this way. It's just not been the case that the magnitude of these differences were anywhere close to this high. Premium amortization when the portfolio was at a premium or hedges when they were out of the money, these were much smaller numbers. but today they are very large and in fact more than doubles the net interest income number. So the economic net interest income was very much in line with the dividend. With respect to the right-hand side, it's just more of the same. You can see the first column is the return of the pass-through portfolio, obviously very negative with the widening that we've seen in the sector. Moving on somewhat quicker in some of these subsequent slides, on page 19, This is just a proxy for our net interest income over time. I think one thing that's interesting takeaway is even though the red line, our economic interest or cost of funding is increased, our net interest margin is 210. And by the way, that's not reflective of everything we just discussed in terms of hedge accounting and discount amortization. So it's actually understated, if you will. It's more like 260. But even at 210, it's really more or less in line with where we've been. In fact, the low was back in late 2019 when it was about 155 basis points. So the net interest margin in this environment is not poor, even with funding costs so high. And we'll talk about this more in a moment. It's actually a very attractive environment to invest in, but it's also an extremely volatile one and one where rates and volatility are working against us. So you have to weigh those factors. in everything you do. Going on forward, slide 20, it's just some more historical information. I do want to talk about slide 21. This is, of course, of paramount importance, our leverage. Obviously, in this type of environment, we have to be very active in managing our leverage. Of course, if you have a book value decline, that means your equity is lower, so you have to lower your liabilities to keep your leverage ratio in line. You don't want it to get excessively high. That means you have to sell assets or short mortgages in one other form or another. As you can see, the leverage ratio was 8.2 at the end of the quarter. As we sit here today, it's our economic leverage ratio, which would be liabilities divided by our equity adjusted for any long or short TBA positions we might have. That number is actually 7.3 as of Wednesday's close of business. So 7.3 today, 8.2 at the end of the quarter. The right-hand chart just shows us for our peers, but because we don't have all the information on our peers for Q3, this is stale data as of Q2, so I really don't need to say much about that. Turning now to slide 22, one thing of note here, we've talked – late last year, early this year, about increasing our exposure to IOs because we thought that pass-throughs would widen and rates would increase. The IO portion of that worked out well. The IOs did very well, so much so that they're at a point where they really can't do any better. Speeds have slowed so much, we've basically extracted all of the value out of those assets. They're no longer effective from a hedging perspective. And so, as you can see on the left-hand side of slide 22, or the right, we took that position from about $175 million down to $50 million. And actually, subsequent to quarter-end, we've shrank even more. We've sold another 28-odd million market value of IOs. So we only have about 22 million IOs left. They're just not of much use to us anymore. And so the capital weighting has been shifting more towards pass-throughs. When we dealt with the rate volatility and so forth, more on the rate hedges versus just using IOs. Now turning to slide 24, just update you on the portfolio. As I said, we had to deal with decreasing equity and increasing leverage, so we had to reduce the portfolio. What did we do? I mentioned that we sold IOs. That was one way. With respect to the pass-throughs, you can see our largest holding there is in the 3% coupon, about $2.3 billion. That's actually about a billion less than where it was at the end of the second quarter, but we didn't just sell those. We actually added to the higher coupons 4.5s and 5s, which at the time were a lot closer to par than they are today. So the net of that's about four. So we reduced our exposure to threes by a billion. added to the higher coupons by four. The net of that is a net decline of $600 million, which is what we in fact had for the quarter. And then on the bottom of the page, we have our hedges. I just want to point out before we move on two points. If you look at the market value of the mortgage assets, about $3.2 billion, the notional on the hedges is now higher. It's at 107% of that balance at $3.425 billion. At the end of the second quarter, the equivalent number was 93%. So we've upped our hedge exposure, as I mentioned, reducing the IO exposure and picking up the hedges in other products, and that's how we've done that. And then just one final point. This is modeled based on the right-hand side. You show our exposure to interest rate shocks, and it's very balanced, which is obviously something desirable for us to maintain. The next slide, we go through speeds. Obviously, this is not a big story since everything is at a discount. Slide 26, this is, again, kind of very intuitive as you look at interest rates. Here on the right-hand side, the 10-year, that's actually stale. As I mentioned, the 10-year is north of 4 and paid out. Again, what we're doing here is we're normalizing our paydowns because the size of the portfolio changes over time. So we just take the dollar amount of paydowns and divide it by the principal balance of the portfolio. And as you would expect with rates high, it's lower. Those dotted lines represent one standard deviation above and below average going back to our inception, March of 13. And we're approximately one standard deviation below average. Back in 13, we actually got fairly far below that. We're benefiting from the fact that most of the passengers that we do own, while they are discounts, are seasoned, so they do pay a little faster, and that's why this number hasn't decreased more than it has. Slide 27 is a snapshot of our funding. You can see all of our counterparties on the left. If you look on the right, there's several lines. There's a red line. There's actually a light gray line, which you can barely see. That just basically represents average one month silver, which is the benchmark that is used for our funding. And then, of course, our cost of funds. And as you can see, at quarter end, it was right around 250. Our hedges are in the money, so that gap between the red line and the blue line has been growing. Obviously, these numbers are as of 930. In all likelihood, by the time we get into early 2023, these numbers are all going to be north of four, simply because the Fed has a lot more hiking to do. One last slide before we conclude the discussion of the portfolio, just our hedges on slide 28. As you can see on the top left, as we've shrank the portfolio, our futures positions have been reduced slightly. We show $750 million, approximately short of a five-year contract. That was down from about $1.2 billion. In the ultras, we were about $2.75, so we reduced that. We have added to TBAs. We're at $475 million. That's versus $175 million at the end of the previous quarter. I do want to point out in the top right, I talked about our hedges. This is where it becomes very explicit. If you look at our swap positions, the average fixed pay rate, 1.39% today, 1.39% at the end of last quarter. But the receive rate, as you can see, has moved materially in our favor today. which means the net estimated fair value has gone up. So that will continue to be the case as the Fed continues to raise rates. With respect to the bottom right, these are our swap options. I just want to point out one thing. You can look at the fixed pay rate. You see it went up. That's just because we're basically delta hedging with these positions. So as the market moved and has moved a lot, that we've just continued to adjust these hedges so that they're kind of at an optimal position in terms of the rates on these instruments. And so that's pretty much it for the portfolio. And what I said I wanted to do is spend some time basically just going over kind of a very current update on our financial condition. So first of all, in terms of liquidity, obviously very important to us. As of 9.30, our cash and encumbered assets represented 53.5% of our equity. Very healthy cash balances. We maintain that number between 40% and 60% basically since our inception, and we've done so since the end of the quarter. So we have very ample liquidity. We don't have any problem meeting margin calls or the like. In fact, with respect to repo, we have very ample access to repo. We have borrowing capacity in excess of our needs. Our haircuts have been stable with one exception. There was one counterparty that did raise their haircut by 1%. We were told it was more of an algorithmic thing, basically just capturing the fact that volatility in the market was higher. Their risk models told them they had to raise haircuts slightly. They did so by 1%. We've had other counterparties, just to be fair, who have talked about raising haircuts over the last month or two, but really haven't seen it, just that one party. And by the way, our portfolio remains 100% agency MBS pools. don't even have much IOs left. So with respect to the ability to fund, these are instruments that are quite easy to fund. And I talked about our leverage ratio. Obviously, we've been maintaining that in a level that we're comfortable with. And that has really driven a lot of our portfolio decision making to the high level. And just want to point out that Our TBA position, what I mentioned, was $475 million at the end of the quarter. We're actually short. We've sold forward $675 million now, and that is very, very useful for us because that allows us – remember, we sold these forward so that, one, it's a very effective hedge against basis widening, but also it allows us a lot of flexibility in terms of maintaining our leverage ratio. So to the extent – that rates move against us and we want to lower our our leverage ratio because it's moved against us we can fill as many as of by selling assets into this tba short as much as we need to do so or we could sell none if conditions warrant so it's been very effective in terms of allowing us to one hedge but also have tremendous flexibility in maintaining our leverage ratio And it's just a very effective way of dealing with the issues. And I mentioned the IOs and so forth before. Not so useful. A few more points with respect to funding. Most of our funding is done in a spread to SOFR. It has been trending higher, which basically reflects two things. One, you just have financial conditions tightening generally. And then two, I think there's a lot more uncertainty in the marketplace over the path of rate hikes, and that's just reflected in a wider spread. So we have seen some winding in the spread to SOFR over the course of the year. We actually did put in some basically floating rate funding earlier in the year, whereby we paid a spread over SOFR that was fixed at initiation. That was actually at a very tight level, so that's been nice. Now I'll just find a little final point just talking about our view on the markets. Obviously, we view the market as attractive in terms of assets, in terms of returns that are available and so forth. But as we learned in Q3, when the same situation was the case, we had a lot of volatility show up in late August, September, and in October. And so caution is definitely warranted. And we do have to maintain a leverage ratio at a safe level. So while the market is extremely attractive, we do have to be somewhat cautious. We do have an ATM. We have the ability to raise capital when we think it's proven to do so, and we may do so if that's the case. But that being said, if the sector gets weak again, as it's done in the past, we can buy back shares. And over the course of the most recent 90 plus days, we in fact did not sell any shares in our ATM and instead bought back a little over 5% of our outstanding shares at a substantial discount to book value. So far we have opted to just buy back shares and capture that discount as opposed to try to issue shares because we really, it's hard to have a lot of conviction in thinking that this period of rising rates and high volatility is over. At the end of the day, it seems that inflation is driving that, and the Fed is very keen on containing inflation, and the data just keeps being strong. So if the data keeps being strong and the Fed has to react to it, we're going to continue to see more of the same. Eventually, I would assume that's going to end, but we don't know with any conviction when that will occur. So we will continue to operate as we have. So that's pretty much it. And with that, I will turn the call over to questions.

If you would like to ask a question, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one at this time. Your first question comes from the line of Jason Stewart with Jones Trading. Please go ahead.