David L. Finkelstein
Thank you, Sean. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us for our second quarter earnings call. Today, as usual, I'll briefly review the macro and market environment as well as our performance for the quarter, then I'll provide an update on each of our three businesses, ending with our outlook. Serena will then discuss our financials before opening up the call to Q&A. . Now starting with the macro landscape, the U.S. economy is persevere through considerable trade-related uncertainty and resulting market volatility in recent months. Growth is likely to run around 1% annualized for the first half of the year, well below the pace of recent years but is arguably outperforming post Liberation Day expectations. Employers hired nearly 450,000 workers in the second quarter, which has lowered the unemployment rate marginally to 4.1%. And overall hiring has slowed compared to recent years, but the labor market is relatively balanced and layoffs have been somewhat muted. Inflation, meanwhile, likely ran at the slowest level in the past three quarters, as the continued decline in service sector inflation offset firming and goods prices, some of which likely tariff related. The economy and the labor market's resilience has affirmed the Fed's current wait-and-see stance with the majority of policymakers indicating a preference for more data to assess the impact of tariffs on inflation. We do expect the Fed to ultimately deliver on the two interest rate cuts projected for 2025 at the last FOMC meeting given the consensus view among policymakers, the current interest rate levels remain somewhat restrictive. As it relates to markets, a positive reversal in sentiment as the second quarter progressed, help risk assets recover from their sharp underperformance in early April, and financial conditions have reached some of the most accommodative levels since the onset of the hiking cycle in 2022. And despite improvement in markets, longer-term treasury yields remain elevated as the market will need to continue to fund large deficits, particularly with the passage of the recent tax and spending bill. Swap spreads have also been unable to reverse the majority of their April tightening, which left Agency MBS spreads 5 to 10 basis points wider on the quarter. Now against this backdrop, we delivered an economic return of 0.7% for the second quarter, while generating earnings available for distribution of $0.73, once again out earning our dividend. And Q2 marked the seventh consecutive quarter of generating a positive economic return for our shareholders, demonstrating the diversification benefit of our three fully scaled housing finance strategies. Year-to-date, we've delivered a 3.7% economic return with a total shareholder return of over 10% through quarter end. And further to note, we raised just over $750 million of accretive capital in the second quarter through our ATM program, which was predominantly deployed in the agency sector. and leverage increased modestly to 5.8x in light of the increased allocation to agency. Now turning to our investment strategies and beginning with agency. Our portfolio ended the quarter at nearly $80 billion in market value, up 6% quarter-over-quarter. After the early April volatility, market conditions for Agency MBS improved. Rates were range- bound, the yield curve remained relatively steep, implied volatility declined and comparable fixed income assets tightened given the favorable risk sentiment in markets. Agency MBS did lag in the recovery as demand from overseas and the bank community has remained muted, but we do think that these participants could become more active, should the Fed resume cutting or as expected regulatory reform materializes. With respect to our activity early in the quarter, we managed our duration through the tariff-driven volatility with little adjustment to our agency portfolio, -- and as markets normalized, we steadily added Agency MBS at attractive spreads in line with our capital raising, growing our agency portfolio by roughly $4.5 billion in notional terms. Purchases were fairly evenly split across 4.5s, 5.5s and 6s, and we marginally preferred pools over TBAs as repo financing was slightly more attractive than dollar roll carry. We continue to operate within a narrow interest rate risk band given the volatility we've experienced thus far this year. And in Q2, all asset purchases were hedged, and duration extension was prudently managed due to the rise in long-end rates. Within our hedge portfolio, we remain in favor of holding swaps against shorter-term risk due to the positive carry profile while maintaining a more balanced mix of treasury and swap exposure in the intermediate and long end. Swap spreads tightened significantly during the quarter and forward markets are signaling further tightening in the months ahead. That changes, however, You can nimbly adjust our hedges between swaps and treasury risk but for now, maintaining a roughly 60-40 hedge allocation between swaps and treasuries is more favorable in our view. Overall, we remain optimistic on the agency sector as fundamentals are sound, and there are several potential catalysts out the horizon to improve Agency MBS technicals. Additionally, we're encouraged by the administration's recent statements regarding GSE reform noting that any privatization efforts will preserve the implicit guarantee and aim to tighten MBS spreads, removing a significant market concern. Shifting to residential credit. Our portfolio was relatively unchanged at $6.6 billion in market value and $2.4 billion of capital. The resi credit sector broadly tracked corporate credit over the quarter, widening in sympathy with other risk assets in early April, only to finish the quarter with spreads roughly unchanged. Now despite the turbulence in the first half of the quarter, the non-agency market demonstrated its durability with over $43 billion of gross issuance in the quarter. Our Onslow Bay platform had its highest quarterly securitization activity to date, closing $3.6 billion across seven transactions, and we priced an additional two securitizations in July bringing cumulative 2025 activity to $7.6 billion across 15 transactions, generating [ 913 million ] of high-yielding proprietary assets for Annaly and our joint venture. Onslow Bay's expanded credit correspondent channel also remain the industry leader, generating $5.3 billion of locks and funding $3.7 billion of loans over the quarter. And this is despite tightening our credit standards once again, given some of the headwinds we are seeing in housing. Our current lock pipeline has a 764 weighted average FICO, and 68% LTV and is over 95% first lien. Regarding the housing market, available-for-sale inventory continues to increase as affordability remains challenged given elevated mortgage rates, high home prices and increased property taxes and insurance premiums. While housing affordability has been an issue for the past three years, we've entered a buyer's market as sellers now materially outweigh prospective homeowners. Higher supply has led to four consecutive months of negative HPA according to