Good morning, and welcome to the third quarter 2022 earnings conference call for Orchid Island Capital. This call is being recorded today, October 28th, 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 risks and uncertainties that could cause 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 Cauley. 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 section. Just to start on slide three, just to kind of give you a overview of the agenda. As always, I will start with 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, then spend some time talking about the current portfolio, hedges and so forth, and what we did during the quarter. 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. 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 $0.26, 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 those same RMBS assets and derivative instruments, including net 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 and subsequently paid 54 and a half cents per share in dividends. Since its initial public offering, the company's 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. On October 30, the company effected a one-for-five reverse stock split. All share and per share numbers have been retroactively adjusted to reflect this in all the slides in this deck today. Now just to go through 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 9:30 A.M., and then the blue line is the one as of last Friday. 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. 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 seven, 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 in convenient pictures. As you can see, with respect to the 10-year or the 10-year SOFR swap, really starting right at the end of July, a meaningful shift. The 10-year was at 2.60%. 10-year SOFR swap is inside of 2.40%. It got as 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. 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 took really starting in 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. They've made it abundantly clear that's not the case, that they're gonna 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 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. On the bottom, we try to give you some historical perspective. 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. 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. 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. Obviously, mortgages have done very poorly, but really it's just all risk assets, and we'll say something about that in a moment. Obviously, it's been a very tough period for mortgages, particularly the third quarter. Slide nine 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 right, you're just looking at the spread between the five- and 30-year Treasuries. You can see we're fairly negative here. Also, it's interesting to note that's occurring at the same time that both the yield on the five-year and the 30-year are at basically the highest level they've been in 10 years. Obviously, these are not normal times versus what we've been accustomed to of late. A couple slides. One last slide here, just really something to keep in mind up 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. 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-year 3%, 4%, 5%, and 6%. What you can see is these are normalized, so taking the price of a given coupon as of 6:30, 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, you know, rear its ugly head. As the Fed pivoted, now all of a sudden rates start going the other way, then everything flip-flops. You see that sixes did very, very well. Their short duration makes sense, and the lower coupons did poorly. There's also the specter of, you know, banks selling or Bank of Japan selling. That performance turned around very meaningfully. You know, this is a very useful chart because at some point, you know, 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. It's a very, you know, kind of a microcosm of how the mortgage market's 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. 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 are bottom left. I'll just go through these quickly. You know, these are the rows. I would like to give you data on the current production coupons like 5% and 5.5% and 6% and 6.5%, 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 payoffs for certain specified pools, we have added fives and sixes, but we only have a very little amount of data. As we move through time, that will come in. In the meantime, you know, just to note, with most of the market trading at a discount, the need for call protection that are offered by specified pools really just isn't there, and as you would expect, those payoffs are very subdued. Now another story on slide 12. This is very important. This is basically our proxy for volatility in the market. As you can see, for instance, on the left side, back in March of 2020, volatility spiked up very, very high. In fact, if you look at what's happened in the current year, it's even higher. More importantly, if you look really what happened starting early in the year when vol 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. That really is just 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, you know, 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, you know, 5% and higher, there just isn't any data, so we really can't show much there. 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 have performed. 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. 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. All risk assets in this environment are suffering meaningfully. Just on slide 15, this is new. Basically this captures all, basically the entirety of the domestic fixed income universe. Everything from investment-grade corporates, down to double B-rated CLOs and CRT bonds and everything in between. Just point your attention to the one of the first columns on the left says Current. That's the current spread, and this is as of 9:30 A.M. If you look over to the right, there's one that shows the 2022 highs, and then where we are at 9:30 A.M. versus that. Zero basically tells you that we are at the high spread. As you can see, pretty much the entire universe is either at or very close to the widest spreads that we've seen over the course of the year, and in fact, many years. You know, 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 to you 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. The refi index, every week that it comes out of late, it makes a fresh multi-decade low. If you look at the bottom, you can see the percent of the universe that's re-financeable, 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. Really what originators are dealing with now is, you know, what to do with headcount and capacity, because obviously, you know, 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. If you look on the left-hand side, this is, you know, a very simple disaggregation of our income statement. 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. In the middle column are all of our realized and unrealized gains and losses. Just to talk about the middle column for the moment, as you can see, you know, 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. Obviously that's the effect of an artifact of what we just discussed. Now if you look at the first column, I want to point out a couple of things. First we show our interest income. That is, you know, we use the fair value option of accounting. 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. We don't reflect that in this number. Of course we have our expenses, and then we have a net interest income of a little over $9 million, which is $0.26. Now that's $0.26. We paid a dividend of $0.545. I need to point out two things. One, as I said, we don't use hedge accounting, but we do hedge, and 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. As those hedges have become very much in the money, net to us, we are receiving cash flows. The cash flows attributable to the third quarter of 2022 was about $5.043 million to us. So that's $0.143. Which again, is not reflected in this table because we don't use hedge accounting. Also, our portfolio, which we have paydowns on, has a weighted average price under $90, so significant discount. As we do get paydowns, we get paid back at par, we have discount accretion. Even though prepayments are low, the magnitude of the discount is extremely high. The accretion of discount for the quarter was $4,647,000, which is $0.132. 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 $0.143. The discount accretion was another $0.132. The two total $0.275, which when you add that to the $0.26 we reflect here, gets you to $0.535. Our economic income for the quarter was $0.01 less than the dividend. 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. It's always been the case that we presented this way. It's just it has 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 whenever 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. The economic net interest income was very much in line with the dividend. With respect to the right-hand side, you know, 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 has increased, our net interest margin is 210. By the way, that's not reflective of everything we just discussed in terms of hedge accounting and premium or discount amortization. It's actually understated, if you will. It's more like 260. 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. The net interest margin in this environment is not poor, even with funding costs so high. We'll talk about this more in a moment. It's actually a very attractive environment to invest in, but it's also extremely volatile one and one where rates and volatility are working against us. You have to weigh those factors in everything you do. Going on forward, slide 20, it's just some more historical information. I do wanna talk about slide 21. This is, of course, of paramount importance, our leverage. You know, 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. 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. It's as of Q2, so I really don't need to say much about that. Turning now to slide 22. One thing of note here, you know, we 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. That worked out well. 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. As you can see on the left-hand side of slide 22, we took or the right, we took that position from about $175 million down to $50. Actually, subsequent to quarter end, we've stricken even more. We sold another 28 million odd market value of IOs. We only have about 22 million IOs left. They're just not of much use to us anymore. The capital weighting has been shifting more towards pass-throughs. When we've dealt with the rate volatility and so forth, more on the rate hedges versus just using IOs. Now turning to slide 24 to 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 $1 billion less than where it was at the end of the second quarter. We didn't just sell those. We actually added to the higher coupons, 4.5% and 5%, which at the time were a lot closer to par than they are today. The net of that's about $4 billion. We reduced our exposure to 3% by $1 billion, added to the higher coupons by $4 billion. The net of that is a net decline of $600 million, which is what we in fact had for the quarter. On the bottom of the page, we have our hedges. I just wanna 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%. 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. Just one final point. This is model-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 slides, we go through speeds. Obviously, this is not a big story since everything is at a discount. Slide 26. You know, this is again kind of very intuitive. As you look at interest rates, you know, here on the right-hand side, the 10-year, that's actually stale. As I mentioned, the 10-year is north of 4%. In pay down, again, what we're doing here is we're normalizing our pay downs because the size of the portfolio changes over time. We just take the dollar amount of pay downs and divide it by the principal balance of the portfolio. 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 2013, and we're approximately one standard deviation below average. Back in 2013, we actually got fairly far below that. We're benefiting from the fact that most of the pass-throughs 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 SOFR, which is the benchmark that is used for our funding, and then of course, our cost of funds. As you can see, at quarter end, it was right around 2.50%. 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 9:30 A.M. In all likelihood, by the time we get into early 2023, these numbers are all going to be north of 4%. 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 down 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. The receive rate, as you can see, has moved materially in our favor, which means the net estimated fair value has gone up. That will continue to be the case as the Fed continues to raise rates. With respect to the bottom right, these are our swaptions. I just want to point out one thing. If you look at the fixed pay rate, you see, the rate went up. That's just because we're basically delta hedging with these positions. As the market moved, and it 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. That's pretty much it for the portfolio. What, like I said, I wanted to do is spend some time basically just going over our, a kind of a very current update on our financial condition. First of all, in terms of liquidity, obviously very important to us. As of 9:30 A.M., our cash and unencumbered assets represented 53.5% of our equity. Very healthy cash balances. We maintain that number between 40%-60%, basically since our inception, and we've done so since the end of the quarter. 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 a, algorithmic thing, basically just capturing the fact that volatility in the market was higher. Their models, 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. By the way, our portfolio remains 100% agency MBS pools. Don't even have much IOs left. With respect to the ability to fund, these are instruments that are quite easy to fund. I talked about our leverage ratio. Obviously, you know, 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 at a high level. Just wanted to point out that our TBA position, what I mentioned was $475 million at the end of the quarter, we're actually short. We sold forward $675 million now. 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. To the extent that rates move against us and we want to lower our leverage ratio because it's moved against us, we can fill as many as by selling assets into this TBA short as much as we need to do so, or we could sell none if conditions warrant. It's been very effective in terms of allowing us to hedge but also have tremendous flexibility in maintaining our leverage ratio. You know, it's just a very effective way of dealing with the issues. You know, 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 at a spread to SOFR. It has been trending higher, which basically reflects two things. One, you just have financial conditions tightening generally. 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. We have seen some widening 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. That's been nice. Now just 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. As we learned in Q3, when the same situation was the case, you know, we had a lot of volatility show up in late August, September, and in October. Caution is definitely warranted. We do have to maintain a leverage ratio at a safe level. While the market is extremely attractive, we do have to, you know, be somewhat cautious. Now, we do have an ATM. We have the ability to raise capital when we think it's prudent to do so, and we may do so if that's the case. That being said, you know, if the sector gets weak again as it's done in the past, we can buy back shares. You know, 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. You know, 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 contending inflation and the data just keeps being strong. If the data keeps being strong and the Fed has to react to it, we're gonna continue to see more of the same. Eventually I would assume that's gonna end, but we don't know with any conviction when that will occur. We will continue to operate as we have. That's pretty much it. 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 JonesTrading. please go ahead. Hey, Bob. Thanks for the update. Sure. I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the forward curve and whether you think there's gonna be a Fed pivot and how you position the portfolio for that. Sure. I really don't put a lot of stake in it. I'll let Hunter speak to this too. As you know, last Friday, that's when this whole pivot thing came back into the market. There was a couple of things. There was a Timiraos article saying that the Fed might consider winding down their hikes or decelerating. Daly, the Fed governor from San Francisco, said the same thing. The Bank of Canada didn't quite hike as much as the market thought they would. ECB was somewhat dovish yesterday. By the way, apparently Timiraos had a tweet today saying that the Fed might reconsider what they do in December and do 75. At the end of the day, the data's gonna drive it. I don't care what the forward curve says or what Timiraos says or anybody says, if next, whatever it is, in two weeks from today when we get the next CPI number, if it's meaningfully higher than consensus estimates, they can't pivot. You know, from what I've been reading, there's a lot of evidence that inflation is fairly well ingrained. If you wanted to make the argument that inflation could stay high for a while, it's easy to do. I'm not an economist, so I can't really do so with any great conviction. I do know that until inflation really slows, I don't see how the Fed can do anything other than continue to try to get ahead of it. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. From a portfolio perspective and a hedging perspective, you know, we have a limited number of tools given that amount of uncertainty. The things that we can do is that we've noticed, of course, to the extent that inflation comes in hotter, you know, mortgages obviously are going to respond negatively to that versus other risk assets. We continue to increase our hedge allocation towards mortgage basis sensitive hedges like TBAs. Then the other thing that we've been looking at and have not done much on this front, but it being long vega, you know, some net long volatility. To the extent that there's upside surprises, we benefit from an updraft in volatility. We have been looking on the front end of the curve to do some things in conditional space just so that if higher for longer plays out and proves to be sort of the mantra, that we can benefit from that without being locked into it in a more symmetric fashion so that if we're in other words, if we're wrong, we lose some premium on some options. But if we're right, then we can benefit from the fact that we're gonna see, you know, higher funding costs for, you know, maybe another year or two or however long this plays out. Yeah. Okay. That's helpful color. How does the TBA short fit into that thought process? The basis has been widening. As I tried to stress in the slide deck, I mean, the mortgage basis has been widening. We had a lot of exposure to threes. That used to be the desirable place to be earlier in the year because nobody wanted to own production coupons because of potential speed increases, nor did they wanna own the deep discount so that what they referred to as belly coupons were fairly desirable. That's changed of late. They've become less so, but no better way to hedge than just shorting the underlying, in this case, the threes. That's about as effective as a hedge as you can use just because it obviously trades with your portfolio. Yeah. 30, 33 rolls in particular are very, very low, so there's not a high explicit cost to doing so. They're not trading special at least. You know, for us, it can be costly to hedge in this manner, but you know, also we like the flexibility of being able to lay off our pools. Most of the specified pool universe at this point has relatively low pay-ups, so you know, we're able to mitigate our risk with respect to mortgage basis by shorting those TBAs. Yeah. No, I understand the down on coupon strategy. I guess I was trying to and last question then I'll jump out of the queue. Sure. Understand what your thought on the basis was over the next, you know, call it three, six months. Well, it's, you could say, like I tried to say at the end of the second quarter, I can't see it getting much wider, and until it did. It still could widen. I mean, it's. We've got to be close to the end. It's just gotten bludgeoned to death. You know, if what would it take to get them materially wider if the Fed started more assertively implying they were gonna absolutely sell mortgages or the Bank of Japan had to intervene and sell mortgages. On that front, the Bank of Japan has intervened in the currency markets and did not sell mortgages, so that's good to see. You know, I just think they're gonna it's. It could get a little wider. It's just what's gonna get them tighter. It's really not until that pivot occurs. When that pivot becomes clear, they're gonna snap tighter, meaningfully so. Going back to that little slide in the deck where you see how mortgages did in late July and early August, you're gonna get a lot of that. It's hard to guess when that point is and whether it's three months or five months. Once we pivot, mortgages are gonna do well because what's likely to happen is the Fed's gonna have to tighten a lot, get the economy, get rates into restrictive territory, and then we're gonna have a recession. When we have a recession, mortgages will do very well. We have no risk component of our asset class. Rates are gonna be, you know, the curve will be inverted. Market will be expecting longer term rates to rally, and mortgages can get back a lot of this widening. When that happens, I'm very happy to be positioned the way we are. Yeah. I wholeheartedly agree with that. You know, you can look back to the cross-asset spread matrix that we put in the deck. Agency mortgages in particular are particularly wide. You know, some other things that are very well insulated from credit risk, like the Agency MBS, are also very wide. Our triple-A CLOs are extraordinarily wide. From the standpoint of Agency MBS, we're, you know, approaching levels that we haven't seen since the financial crisis, really. As somebody, I think Morgan Stanley was talking about this the other day, that, you know, what's unique about this environment versus the global financial crisis was there was some little bit of uncertainty as to whether or not Agency MBS were actually going to be, you know, not have credit risk back then because there was a lot of uncertainty around the GSEs. We've certainly seen that firm up. You know, there's no indication that the GSEs aren't gonna stand behind their guarantee or have the ability to stand behind their guarantee obligations at this point, and they're just really wide. You know, I think we're gonna trade directionally, like we just said, with inflation and the economic data. To the extent that rates go higher and inflation is hotter than expected, I would expect the basis to remain weak. To the extent that the Fed really starts feeling more comfortable in this concept of pivoting and you know, in that situation, I think that the basis could tighten firmly. There's a lot of liquidity issues still working their way through the market and not a lot of the traditional buyers of Agency MBS in particular are just not there yet. Of course, the Fed has made their exit this year. I think the market's still kind of digesting all of that. Yeah, we haven't talked about that, but liquidity is not a non-issue. There's definitely liquidity issues even in the Treasury market. You know, that gets to this whole idea about QT and how much the Fed can drain liquidity from the system. As of now, I don't think it's acute, but I wouldn't be surprised. One of the stories of 2023 is likely gonna be when or if the Fed has to stop QT because liquidity conditions are getting too tight. I mean, there's still, whatever, $2.1 trillion in the RRP, so it's not an issue now, but it could become one, if they continue to tighten financial conditions. The other thing is that you're starting to see a little bit of it in the earnings for Q3, but you're likely to see more of it going forward. You're gonna see earnings are gonna be weak, and then you're gonna see margin pressure, and then eventually you're gonna see layoffs, and jobs are gonna go from positive to negative. That just brings more and more pressure on the Fed when conditions are tight and the economy is contracting and people are losing their jobs. You know, that's, you know, that's how it's gonna play out. Eventually they're gonna either contain inflation or they're not gonna contain inflation, but they're gonna bear, you know, potentially buckle to the pressure to ease because everything else is so nasty. You know, that. Who knows how that plays out if they don't have inflation under control. Anyway, next year is gonna be equally interesting. Good points, and thank you as always for the color. Appreciate it, guys. Yep. Thanks. Cheers. Your next question is from the line of Mikhail Goberman with JMP Securities. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, gentlemen. Hope, everybody's doing well in these, difficult times. Good morning. Good morning. I wonder if you could provide, perhaps a book value update, for the month of October up to now. Also just kind of a question on capital management going forward, how you guys are thinking about the dividend. With the stock run-up, the really strong stock run up these past few, two weeks, I guess, how you guys are thinking about those share buybacks with, the stock trading, I guess above book value at this point. Thanks. Actually, our book, we put in the press release that was out there. It was between $10.60 and $10.70 as of Wednesday's close. Okay. Thank you. You know, we benefited from the activity the last few days. I know, for instance, agency reported on Monday, and you know, Friday was kind of a rough day, but the mortgage market has done very well these last few days. We're at the $10.60-$10.70 range. I don't know where the stock's trading at this very moment, but when I came in here, it was below that. When it's below that, we will consider buying back shares, although I don't know that the discount's quite that large. When we were buying back shares earlier this month, it was 20%+ discount. Mm-hmm. If we get back there, we will do so again. That's book value. That's our approach to the buyback. As far as capital, you know, really, you know, if the stock trades well and, you know, there's a benefit to raising liquidity, if nothing else, in raising capital. It's really, I think warrants caution, like I said, in this market. It's just hard to say when that pivot point is. I know the market wants to do so very badly, and everybody wants to, but at the end of the day, the inflation data is driving the Fed, and the Fed's driving the market. I haven't seen much that's convinced me that we're about to see inflation roll over. It's more the opposite. You keep seeing more and more evidence of it becoming more ingrained. Even today in the ECI numbers, you know, public sector wage gains lag private sector wage gains, but they tend to be more sticky once they go up. Mm-hmm. They were higher, like, more than double the highest quarterly increase in two decades. That's not a good sign for the Fed, and the Fed will pay attention to that. You know, that's probably why Nick Timiraos had his little tweet out today about the Fed's reconsidering December. That's what's driving everything. You know, I'd love to raise capital because assets are cheap, but if, you know, if we're gonna get slammed again, I don't know how good an idea that is. Well, thank you for that. Also, just one more from me. How are you guys thinking about operating expenses going forward? Thanks. Well, obviously they're coming under pressure because as we've shrank and we've had elevated hedging costs. Although in our income statement, as you'll see in our Q, the one line item for operating costs, which is inflated, is kind of a quirk in our accounting system where a lot of the costs associated with putting our hedges on are expensed in the quarter incurred versus spread over the life of the hedge. Might have to revisit that with the auditors. I think that's a little penal, and it's causing our expenses to look worse than they are. The other main line item, obviously, is the management fee. As our capital has decreased, it's coming down, but it does so with a lag. It does stick out for sure. Hopefully at some point here in the near future, our capital stabilizes and maybe even goes up, and it'll come into line. For now, it does seem to stick out a little bit. Otherwise, you know, we've had some inflation in our costs. I know our audit fee did go up, just same reason everybody else is raising fees. You know, we just do everything we can to contain costs as much as we can going forward. With respect to the operating costs, the fee schedule that we have, just for a little bit of background, I guess, maybe I should back up. Both the futures hedges as well as the cleared swaps are flow through an FCM, and we have two of those. Those schedules on our, so our per contract cost or our cost for cleared swaps, those are unchanged. It's just the activity's kicked up. You can see for the nine months ended September 30th, we, you know, we are up, you know, over double on that particular line item, and that's attributable to that. Our operating costs with respect to management fee and overhead allocation will trend lower as the portfolio turns over. We do have some. It's a little bit sticky there in the way that the management contract works, but it should be trending down a little bit over time as well, so. If need be, you know, the dividend just is reduced, which we've done. I mean, for now, you know, I went through in hopefully great enough detail, we're earning right at that number. You know, and hopefully we stabilize here. I think we've done enough to do so. You know, we'll see how it goes going forward. All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. And, best of luck going forward in this tough environment, and best wishes in the holiday season. Thank you. You too as well, Mikhail Goberman. Thanks. Your next question is from the line of Christopher Nolan with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Hey, Chris. Bob, the discount accretion income, is that gonna be a recurring deal, do you think? Or, you know, what's more run rate can we get with that? Well, it looks like it is for the time being since 99.99% of the market's a discount. Yeah, it's a big number. As I said, speeds aren't that fast, but the magnitude of the discount, our weighted average current prices at the end of the quarter is an 89 handle, so it's, you know, well over 10 points of discount. There's a lot of discount accretion. You know, back in the day, everything was always at a premium and, you know, we always had a lot of specified pools. Even though we had a lot of premium, we had slow speeds. Well, now we've got even more discounts, and so that number is quite large. Like I said, it was about $4.6 million, which is in pennies. You know, $0.13, I think it was, $0.7. I don't remember the exact number off the top of my head. Yeah. $0.132. It's big, especially in light of the fact that, you know, our dividend now is smaller than it used to be. You know, it's a meaningful number. Chris, that number's on slide 22, by the way. I'm sure you've seen it. Just to anybody who didn't catch that, it's on the right-hand side of page 22 in the presentation materials we put out. It actually says premium loss due to pay downs, but that's a positive number, so it's discount accretion. Okay. Good. Thanks, Hunter. The income from the hedge, I mean, that's just. I don't think you've detailed it in the past, but is that sort of just an ongoing deal? Well, it's just so important now. I mean, you know, for especially the last two years and frankly up until 2018 and 2019 when rates were so low, you know, the hedge cost was kind of a non-material number. I mean, the curve was fairly steep and, you know, it was a stable number. The dividend, of course, was higher then, so the impact was much smaller. Now, the dividend's smaller, and with rates this high and going higher, you know, those hedges are very, very far in the money. They're more in the money than they ever were out of the money, if that makes sense. Actually, if you look at on slide 19 has the economic cost of funds, you can see that it got a little high towards the end of the last decade. Prior to that, it'd been very, very low. Well, you know, now it's going back up, but not nearly as fast as SOFR is. You know, SOFR's gonna be north of 4% very soon. Our hedges, you know, like hedges, the swaps where we pay fixed rates like 139 basis points. It's just a meaningful number and when the dividend is smaller, so the combination of the two makes the impact very significant. Great. Just to confirm, you guys have not received any margin calls in the third quarter or the fourth quarter to date. Is that correct? No. We get margin calls every day. We haven't missed. Oh, okay. We get margin calls every day. Yeah. I mean, we have margining activity on both the hedges and the assets every day. That's. Yeah. I mean, with volatility in the market, you're gonna get, you know, margin calls. That's a daily part of life for us. It's, you know. Yeah We are constantly squaring up with the counterparties that we lend that we borrow from and for versus the value of our collateral and how much money they've given us. But we've never failed to meet a margin call in our whole entire operating history. You know, we're not in, you know, breach of anything right now, so. Okay. No, thank you for the clarification. Okay. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Chris. There is a follow-up question from the line of Jason Stewart with JonesTrading. please go ahead. All right. Hey, thanks for taking the follow-up. Just wanted to go back to the concept of discount and your view of housing turnover and what the natural rate there is given where mortgage rates are. You know, and when we look at discount accretion, you know, that becomes a big factor in that equation. Wanted to hear your view. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it's gonna continue. Now, of course, right now is a seasonal slowdown, so for the next three or four months it's gonna be slow. The question is, how does it come out of the seasonal slowdown? Of course, that's gonna be a function of where we are in terms of the market and rates. Certainly if rates stay at 7%, it's gonna be low. The other thing that's gonna affect turnover is gonna be job growth or loss. I think the chances that the net change in jobs is gonna be south of where it is today is high. In other words, I think it's, you know, it doesn't bode well for housing turnover in the next year. Now that being said, we own a lot of seasoned discounts. They pay at mid to high single digits. There is still some discount amortization. But I think what's really driving it are two things. One, it's the magnitude of the discount. So even though speeds are slow, you're picking up a fair amount of discount amortization. And two, the dividend is just a lot lower than it used to be. So it's more relevant. You know, when the dividend was not $0.16, but I think if you look at that one chart, at one point it was as high as $0.70. You know, that $5 million of discount or accretion is a much bigger percentage. It means more for us now, as do the hedges. You know, as we come out of this at some point and the curve re-steepens, and hopefully the dividend can recover, and those two factors will go back to being not as significant. We have a lot of collateral that's coming up the curve, too, just in terms of wall of ramp. I don't know how long that'll continue or how long those borrowers will continue to be active in either some type of home equity takeout or just turnover in general. We sort of are expecting to see, I think, the speeds in the mid-single digits. Some vintages may be a little bit higher. We've seen kind of a resilient amount of turnover activity in some of the two, three, four-year-old loans. I suspect some of that will taper off with time just because mortgage rates are so high now. Again, a lot of our portfolio is in very low payups, 83s. We can, at any point in time, dump a lot of that into a TBA bid or grab a few ticks of pay-up. We don't have, really, a lot of exposure for underperformance in that coupon, as it relates to specified pools versus the TBA. We can always reload and go back into something that's a little yieldier to the extent that those that discount accretion starts to slow down. You know, I mean, to your point, we could retest the lows of turnover. You know, it used to be not that long ago when turnover was running, you know, even north of 10%, sometimes 11% CPR. You know, we could be pushing 5% or lower. Mm-hmm. It's gonna be pretty damn low. You know, unless something changes, we're gonna retest the lows. Probably the lowest ever turnover rate is gonna happen in the next year would be my guess. Those really deep discount coupons, we don't own any 2022 production and have a fair amount of 2020 and 2021 production, which still has ample amount of home price appreciation baked into it. We'll see if that holds but, you know, they have been. They've surprised to the fast side for me personally. I think the street's kind of had it pretty dialed in. I don't see valuations really being whipping around much as a byproduct of you know, speeds coming down. But just from my own point of view, I think that with mortgage rates as high as they've been and lock-in as pronounced as it's been, I'm kind of surprised that we continue to see- You know. ... you know, double-digit speeds on some pools and GSEs. Yeah, we still see production like $2 billion-$2.5 billion a day. That's surprising to me. I don't really see how it's staying as high as it is. It is. I mean, it's very consistent, persistent. We'll see. Okay. Thanks for taking the follow-up. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the call back to Mr. Cauley for any closing remarks. Thank you, operator. Thank you, everybody, for taking the time. If anybody comes up with a follow-up question or you just happen to not make the call and listen to the replay and you wanna ask a question, feel free to call the office. The number is 772-231-1400. Otherwise, we look forward to speaking to you at the end of the fourth quarter. Have a good one, everybody. Thank you. This does conclude the Orchid Island Capital third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.