Yahoo Finance Invesco Mortgage Capital Inc (IVR) Q2 2019 Earnings Call Transcript
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Invesco Mortgage Capital Inc (NYSE: IVR)
Q2 2019 Earnings Call
Aug 8, 2019, 9:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
Prepared Remarks
Questions and Answers
Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Welcome to Invesco Mortgage Capital Second Quarter 2019 Investor Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]
Now, I will turn the call over to Brandon Burke, Investor Relations. Mr. Burke, you may begin the call.
Brandon Burke -- Director, Investor Relations
Thank you, and welcome to Invesco Mortgage Capital second quarter 2019 earnings call. The management team and I are delighted you've joined us and we look forward to sharing with you our prepared remarks and conducting a question-and-answer session.
Joining today are John Anzalone, our Chief Executive Officer; Kevin Collins, our President; Lee Phegley, our Chief Financial Officer; Dave Lyle, our Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Norris, our Chief Investment Officer.
As a reminder, statements made in this conference call and the related presentation may include forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations about future events and our overall plans and performance. These forward-looking statements are made as of today and are not guarantees. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions and there could be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from our expectations.
For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please see the risk described in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings with the SEC. Invesco makes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. We may now [Phonetic] also discuss non-GAAP financial measures during today's call. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures may be found at the end of our earnings presentation. Too view the slide presentation today, you may access our website at invescomortgagecapital.com and click on the Q2 2018 Earnings Presentation link under Investor Relations.
Again, welcome and thank you for joining us today. I'll now turn the call over to our CEO, John Anzalone.
John Anzalone -- Chief Executive Officer
Good morning, and thank you for joining us on IVRs second quarter earnings call. This quarter commemorates the 10th year anniversary of IVRs Initial Public Offering. Investors in IVRs common stock have achieved an annualized total return of 11.4% since our inception on June 25, 2009. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported us over the past decade.
I'm pleased to announce core earnings for the second quarter of $0.46, despite an increase in financial market volatility, characterized by sharply lower rates, elevated prepayment fears and wider spreads in the agency mortgage market. Our book value was stable ending the quarter at $16.21. Combined with our $0.45 dividend this produced an economic return for the quarter of 2.3%. This brings our year-to-date economic return to a robust 12%.
Before Brian goes into details of the portfolio, I want to take a few minutes to discuss how through active management, we produced results that have not only allowed us to recently increase our dividend, but to consistently out earn that dividend while keeping book value volatility mitigated. There are three things that I believe has been critical to our success.
The first is the recent repositioning of our assets. We purposely rotated into assets with greater prepayment protection and going forward we believe managing convexity risk is going to be the greatest challenge facing our space. While we have always focused on buying specified pool collateral. Over the past several quarters, we've rotated out of areas of the agency market were prepayment protection is less readily available, namely 15 year and hybrid collateral and into prepay protected 30 year specified pools.
At the same time, we reduced our overall exposure to the agency mortgage sector and allocated a significant portion of our capital to agency CMBS, when ROEs on those bonds were very attractive. Agency CMBS bonds have minimal prepayment risk while exhibiting less spread volatility compared to private label paper. While these active moves have not eliminated prepayment risk entirely our exposure has been greatly reduced. The breadth and depth of capabilities and resources available at Invesco allow us to take advantage of the flexibility inherently available in the hybrid mortgage REIT model.
The second thing, I would point out is our seasoned credit book. Well, we have been selecting -- while we've been selected in adding to our credit book, we still have 45% of our equity capital dedicated to residential and commercial credit. Brian, will go into more detail on this in a minute, but the majority of our credit positions were issued prior to 2015, which means they have been the beneficiary of years of property price appreciation and have shorter durations. The property price appreciation has had the effect of strengthening our credit enhancement and the shorter duration has help to insulate our portfolio against the impact of interest rate and credit spread movements, making them an attractive investment for this environment.
Additionally, like Agency CMBS, non-Agency CMBS benefits from notable prepayment protection, which provides a nice way to lock in -- a rate hedged net interest margin, that doesn't constantly force you to reinvest into a lower absolute yield environment. The third thing, I'd like to point out as our strong risk management discipline. Active risk management is an area that often gets overlooked in this space, but it's absolutely critical when markets become volatile.
The book value and earnings stability that we've been able to achieve would not be possible without our strong culture of risk management. Despite the downdraft in rates, our book value has remained relatively stable. We have avoided mismatches between our assets and liabilities in key rates across the interest rate curve, including the front end [Phonetic].
In particular, the spread between one month and three-month LIBOR has collapsed over the past several quarters, with that relationship inverting as the market anticipates more cuts in the Fed funds rate. We are well hedged in this part of the curve and have less experience to know net interest margin compression due to these changes.
I'll finish by saying that all of this, would it be nearly impossible to achieve without the Invesco platform behind us. While only a few of us speak on these calls, we have a large extremely talented team of experienced portfolio managers, traders, credit analyst and risk managers behind us.
And our investors gain access to all this expertise while paying one of the smallest expense ratios in the space. Thanks and I'll hand the call over to Brian to discuss the portfolio.
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Thanks, John and good morning to everyone on the call. I'll start on Slide 6, where I like to highlight the advantages of our actively managed hybrid strategy and providing book value stability. While our equity and asset allocations to agency in credit assets remained relatively stable. We continue to rotate out of Agency RMBS and into Agency CMBS given its attractive prepayment characteristics and funding levels.
Our Agency CMBS position grew 13% total assets during the second quarter, up from 9% in the first quarter with an offsetting decline in Agency RMBS assets. This rotation within agency assets allowed us to keep leverage largely unchanged, while maintaining core earnings above our dividend.
The increase in Agency CMBS over the past year, accompanied by the rotation out of less prepay protected 15-year and hybrid agency RMBS collateral and into 30 year specified pools, increased our total allocation to assets with prepay protection to 86% of the total portfolio, up from 62% in the second quarter of 2018, which should provide additional book value protection and a more predictable core earnings stream despite the recent sharp move lower in rates.
In addition, to the portfolio rotation within our agency assets, they continued strong performance in seasoning of our credit assets also supports book value stability, as embedded property price appreciation, improves credit quality and shortening duration dampens spread volatility.
Lastly, we were also active in managing our hedge book during the quarter making adjustments across the swap curve to lock in lower fixed rates while also responding to movements in the durations of our assets as interest rates rallied.
Moving on to Slide 7, the pie chart in the upper left hand corner of the slide displays the composition of our Agency RMBS assets. Our total Agency RMBS book declined by approximately $640 million during the quarter, through a combination of pay-downs and sales as capital was deployed into Agency CMBS, but the composition within our Agency RMBS book remained relatively unchanged. Generic Agency RMBS spreads widen during the quarter, and particularly in May as sharply lower interest rates and higher volatility weighed on valuations.
Underperformance in this sector was largely offset by our allocation to prepayment protected specified pools as payoffs on our holdings appreciated by approximately two thirds of a point. To start pool pay-ups have risen sharply since the beginning of the year and we expect them to be well supported at these levels, as lower interest rates and a worsening environment for TBA increased demand for prepay protected assets.
Turning to Slide 8, you can see in the lower left hand table that our allocation to Agency CMBS has grown to nearly $3 billion, we purchased $819 million of Agency CMBS during the quarter, predominantly in the Fannie Mae DUS program. Spreads tightened modestly during the quarter and we anticipate continuing to add to our position in the sector given attractive spreads, repo funding and prepayment characteristics, which provides strong risk-adjusted returns and served as a nice complement to our Agency RMBS book.
Moving on to commercial credit on Slide 9. Our CMBS portfolio consists of the combination of well seasoned single A and BBB bonds financed via repo, and AAA and AA bonds finance at the Federal Home Loan Bank. Our holdings continue to perform very well from a credit fundamentals perspective and strong demand during the quarter led to tighter spreads and modest book value gains.
In addition, we were able to add $120 million of recently issued non-Agency CMBS during the quarter with ROEs in the low to mid-teens as accretive opportunities remain available. Slide 10 highlights the credit quality of our commercial portfolio. Fundamentals and commercial real estate remains supportive of our assets, particularly given the season nature of our portfolio as property price appreciation since issuance reduces embedded leverage in our holdings. The chart on the left shows the seasoning of our CMBS assets indicating roughly 70% of our holdings were originated five or more years ago while the chart on the right highlights the strong credit performance of our holdings with $684 million, benefiting from rating agency upgrade since purchase.
Positively spreads on seasoned subordinate bonds continue to benefit from increased investor demand due to rating agency upgrades, contracting spread duration, embedded property price appreciation and in some cases deleveraging from loan paydowns.
Slide 11 covers our residential credit portfolio. This portfolio remains well diversified as indicated in the pie chart in the upper left. Spread tightening across most of our assets was partially offset by widening in our season GSE CRT securities as a sharp move lower in rates led to faster prepayments and bonds that have experienced significant price appreciation since issuance.
However, credit fundamentals remain supportive here as healthy borrower balance sheets combined with lower mortgage rates and improving wage growth are helping to offset declining affordability due to the rise in home prices. Given the strong fundamental and technical backdrop of the sector fewer opportunities are available to add accretive assets in the residential credit, although we were able to add $26 million in recent issue GSE CRT during the quarter.
Slide 12, provides some detail around the credit quality of our residential credit portfolio. 66% of our CRT investments have been upgraded by at least one rating since issuance as shown on the chart on the left. The upgrades are result of significant underlying home price appreciation and low default rates. The chart on the right reflects the vintage distribution of our investments were approximately two thirds of our assets were issued prior to 2015 and benefit from the strong recovery in the housing market.
Lastly, Slide 13 summarizes our financing and hedging. At quarter end, we had $17 billion of repo outstanding with 31 counterparties and $1.65 billion of secured financing through the Federal Home Loan Bank. We have seen improved financing spreads for our credit assets, offsetting modestly wider financing spreads on Agency RMBS, while the reduction in LIBOR improves funding across our target assets. To reduce the risk associated with changes in repo funding cost we held $12.5 billion notional of interest rate swaps, which fell modestly quarter-over-quarter as we took advantage of lower swap rates during the quarter by locking in longer-dated hedges requiring less swap notional.
We continue to avoid exposure to the basis between one-month LIBOR and three-month LIBOR by focusing primarily on one-month LIBOR swaps, which better matches changes in our financing costs protecting them and reducing the volatility of our core earnings.
In closing, we believe we are well positioned for the current environment given our efforts over the last year to increase the percentage of investments with prepayment protection characteristics. Our credit portfolio should continue to benefit from notable asset seasoning supportive and supportive real estate fundamentals and our hybrid structure as well as the broader Invesco platform gives us the needed flexibility to continue to find attractive reinvestment opportunities.
That ends my prepared remarks. Now, we will open the lines for Q&A.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator instructions] Our first question comes from Doug Harter with Credit Suisse. You may ask your question.
Douglas Harter -- Credit Suisse Securities -- Analyst
Thanks. Obviously, as you guys mentioned prepays or spec pools have done well in pay-ups are now relatively high. Just wondering how you see kind of the trade-off today between kind of those high pay-ups and kind of higher pre-pays in more generic collateral?
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Yeah. Thanks, Doug, this is Brian. Yeah, we've certainly seen an increase in pay-ups and like I said, I think given the current environment, we expect those pay-ups to persist at these levels. The benefit of specified pools is certainly kind of the, the lack of negative convexity that you see in them, so you see much steadier duration profile on the bonds and longer duration.
So, that helps protect your NIM. That we're -- currently seeing net interest margin of about 75 to 100 basis points on specified pools, whereas in generic collateral that net interest margin is more around 50 basis points. So that's a pretty significant difference in ROE that we're seeing between those two.
Douglas Harter -- Credit Suisse Securities -- Analyst
And then I guess, if you could just talk about, I guess, how you're thinking about protecting book value -- just from those spec pool pay-ups, if we were to kind of get a surprise increase in rates similar to kind of say the experience of the taper tantrum in 2013 and kind of what lessons might have been learned from there, if we were to see kind of spec pool prices come down sharply?
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Right. A couple of things there. We do focus on lower pay-up to the extent that we can. Lower pay-ups story. So we're talking kind of low FICO, high LTV, high loan balance bond. So we're avoiding the extremely high pay-ups that we're seeing in the market right now. And then secondarily, just the reduction overall in our portfolio to Agency RMBS kind of insulates the entire portfolio, we've seen our percentage of total assets to the Agency RMBS sector shrink from about 70% to 60% over the last year. So we think that's going to, to help insulate us from any changes in pay-ups.
Douglas Harter -- Credit Suisse Securities -- Analyst
Great, very helpful. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. And next question comes from Eric Hagen with KBW. You may ask your question.
Eric Hagen -- Keefe, Bruyette & Woods -- Analyst
Thanks. Good morning guys. I'll kind of tag along to some of the questions Doug was just asking and maybe go into the CMBS sector too. So as you guys think about the relative value between deploying new capital into Agency RMBS versus CMBS, how are you guys thinking about that? Because it seems like the more favorable prepaid profile that you guys talked about for CMBS would imply much stronger relative value considering the environment we're in. I'm just trying to understand how you think about that?
And I guess, what I'm really trying to ask is, what prevents you from being much more aggressive in rotating out of RMBS and into CMBS?
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Yeah. Thanks, Eric. I'll take this one again. Yeah, certainly, you're on the right path there. We -- I've been reinvesting most of our pay-downs into Agency CMBS, we continue to like that story. There's less supply there. So that makes it a little more difficult to be too aggressive. We can't necessarily rotate large percentage of our portfolio just given that we would likely tighten the market on it.
So as long as the ROE's are relatively close to each other between Agency CMBS and RMBS. We will definitely lean toward the Agency CMBS side, but again just given more limited supply there. It does dampen our ability to transition significantly.
Eric Hagen -- Keefe, Bruyette & Woods -- Analyst
Got it. That certainly makes sense. Can you just give us a snapshot of where levered ROE's on Agency RMBS and CMBS stand today relative to earlier in the year. Call it mid-February-ish when you guys raised capital? Thanks.
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Yeah, mid-February we were talking probably mid-teens, say 14% to 16% ROE's and now we're low double digits. So, like I said earlier on specified pools we're seeing NIMs and 75 to 100 basis point range. So that would imply low double digits into maybe 13%.
Eric Hagen -- Keefe, Bruyette & Woods -- Analyst
Okay. And quarter-to-date, how has repo -- one-month repo changed? Where are you guys roll-in three-month repo on the agency side?
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Yeah. On agencies, it's come in quite a bit, mainly due to LIBOR. And like I said, spreads have widened a little bit financing spreads that is, but we are seeing pretty significant pickup in or I'm sorry more attractive financing levels given the pressure on LIBOR.
Eric Hagen -- Keefe, Bruyette & Woods -- Analyst
Have rates dropped to the full 25, at the Fed cut? Or has it been something less than that?
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Yeah, we're getting pretty close. I want to say, we're around $2.30, low $2.30's on agency repo right now. So, we were certainly in the $2.50, $2.60 area not too long ago?
Eric Hagen -- Keefe, Bruyette & Woods -- Analyst
Got it. That's helpful color. And then on the non-agency RMBS. How should we think about pre-pays there, just call it over the near term and what that does to the overall kind of return in the strategy, just given that you hold those bonds at a discount? Thanks.
David Lyle -- Chief Operating Officer
Yeah. Hey, this is David Lyle. I'll take that one. You know that we had seen them tick up a bit as rates have rallied and that shouldn't be a surprise, there is still some rate incentive in that collateral despite the seasoning. Although I will say, we saw when rates were very low in that, in those same pools in 2016. We saw a greater increase in pre-pays and given that those borrowers had seen, have seen low rate levels before it may not be as sensitive this time around, but at the same time, we have additional home price appreciation.
So, there could be better borrower equity position that will make up for some of that. So I would, short answer is -- I would not expect pre-pays to run as high as they did in 2016, but at the same time, we have and will continue to see them run a little bit higher, which is positive for yields on that part of the book given that book values that are at a discount are in these bonds.
Eric Hagen -- Keefe, Bruyette & Woods -- Analyst
Got it. Thank you very much for the comments.
Operator
Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from Trevor Cranston with JMP Securities. You may ask your question.
Trevor Cranston -- JMP Securities -- Analyst
Hey, thanks. Follow up on Eric's last question about prepays, and I guess resi credit book. More specifically on the CRT portfolio. I was just wondering if you guys could talk about what kind of, what kind of premium your CRT portfolio currently trades at, and what impact do you think you could see on that book from faster pre-pay speeds?
David Lyle -- Chief Operating Officer
Yeah, sure. That's a good point. I should clarify my, you know, my last answer, related to the legacy book, so it is distinctly different story for CRT. I don't want to quote our exact premium on our season CRT, but generally 2014, 2016 type M2s and M3s have a premium anywhere from call it 6 to 12 points over par and there is some prepayment sensitivity there. So the fact that the weighted average lives will shorten as collateral speeds increase means that you have to amortize that premium over a shorter period of time and that's not helpful for spreads. So we have seen, we have seen some drag on our season CRT book just in terms of spread widening and valuation performance and we highlighted that in our presentation and prepared comments is one of the areas of our book where we did suffer a little bit of valuation decline. But overall, we continue to like those bonds. We had a very good entry point given that, we built that book several, several years ago. And it's, it's kind of a portfolio that can be recreated today at the spread levels that we put it on, despite the widening of spreads that we've seen. So the ROEs being generated by that will continue to be accretive and beneficial for the portfolio despite some of the spread widening caused by faster fee [Phonetic] base.
Trevor Cranston -- JMP Securities -- Analyst
Got it, OK. And then on the hedge portfolio, you guys talked about a bit about the benefits of dynamically hedging as rates have come down a lot. Looking at Slide 13. It doesn't look like there is any big changes in the, in the notional swap position anyways. Can you, can you talk a little bit in more detail about what the changes to the hedge book were and maybe also comment on kind of where you're running the duration gap currently?
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Sure. Yeah, this is Brian. Yeah, most of the changes. So we did extend out our maturities a little bit. So and we also were able to take-off some swaps and our treasury futures. Just as kind of the durations on our Agency RMBS assets we're shortening, we were able to take some swaps off and also like I said, kind of lock-in those lower rates in longer duration, so extended that out a little bit.
So it was a little bit of, we don't have our treasury future exposure kind of on there, but we did take some of those off as well.
Trevor Cranston -- JMP Securities -- Analyst
Okay. Great.
David Lyle -- Chief Operating Officer
Yeah, I'd like to add that our current positioning in terms of, equity duration. We have -- empirically we're running pretty close to zero duration right now. I mean, give or take, a year or two given how volatile the rate environment is, but it's been remarkably stable.
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
Okay, great. That's helpful. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. At this time, I'm showing no further questions. I'll turn the call over to John Anzalone.
John Anzalone -- Chief Executive Officer
Okay. Well, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us on the call this morning. And I'd also like to thank everyone who has helped make IVR successful over the past decade, and we look forward to joining you all next quarter. Thanks.
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]
Duration: 26 minutes
Call participants:
Brandon Burke -- Director, Investor Relations
John Anzalone -- Chief Executive Officer
Brian P. Norris -- Chief Investment Officer
David Lyle -- Chief Operating Officer
Douglas Harter -- Credit Suisse Securities -- Analyst
Eric Hagen -- Keefe, Bruyette & Woods -- Analyst
Trevor Cranston -- JMP Securities -- Analyst
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