Standby. We're about to begin. Good morning, and welcome to the Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call for Orchid Island Capital. This call is being recorded today, July 28th, 2023. At this time, the company would like to remind the listeners that statements made during today's conference call related 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. Hopefully, everybody's had a chance to download our slide deck. I'll be going through that over the course of today's call. As usual, I'll be following the same format. I'll start on slide three, just a table of contents, just to give you an outline of the agenda. The first item will just be a quick overview of our results of operations for the quarter. Then I will talk about market developments and what we dealt with over the course of the quarter, and then our financial results, before finally describing our current portfolio positioning with respect to the portfolio, the hedges, and so forth. Then say a few words about how we see things going forward.
With that, turning to slide four, Orchid Island generated net income per share of $0.25 per share for the quarter. Net earnings, excluding realized and unrealized gains and losses on RMBS and derivative instruments, including net interest income on interest rate swaps, was -$0.34 per share. Gain of $0.59 per share from net realized and unrealized gains on RMBS and derivative instruments, again, including net interest income on interest rate swaps. Book value per share at June 30 was $11.16, versus $11.55 at March 31st, 2023. In Q2 2023, the company declared and subsequently paid $0.48 per share in dividends. Since our initial public offering, the company has declared $65.77 per share in dividends, including the dividend declared in July 2023.
Total economic gain of $0.09 per share for the quarter, or 0.08%. That is an unannualized figure. Now going to market developments. There were basically four notable developments that occurred during the quarter. The first, which occurred in late May, was the debt limit impasse between the administration and Congress. While that was resolved, during that period, we did see very negative performance for risk assets generally, but more importantly, mortgage-backed securities in particular.
I'll just talk about this more in a moment, but it was during that period that, most measures of mortgage pricing, in other words, in terms of spread to some comparable duration, Treasury reached a cycle high in late May, and that was significant, of course, and that did trigger some actions on our part, which again, I'll get into in a few moments. The second development was the recovery in mortgages in June. Obviously, we haven't recovered all the way back anywhere close to where we were pre-pandemic, but the mortgage sector had a very good recovery in June.
The third item, which really has gone on for two-plus months now, is a restrengthening, if you will, of economic data, both inflation data, strong labor market data, GDP yesterday, and the resulting reaction on the part of not just the Fed, but central banks across the globe, which have become very, you know, even more hawkish. As we saw this week, another hike, with the potential, at least potential, maybe not, maybe not ultimately be realized, but even more hikes to come. The fourth item, which occurred in the second quarter, which were a result of the bank failures in March, with the FDIC taking over those banks, were the auctions of the assets of well over $100 billion, approximately $61 billion of pass-through mortgages.
That started on April 18th and is still ongoing, although it is going much faster than initially anticipated and is also going quite well. Those are kind of the four major macro developments we dealt with. Now, just to go through the slides, just to give you some of these things in pictures. Slide six, it looked the same, this slide, for a year and a half. What we see, you know, the red line there is where we were at the end of the last quarter, and the lines above it are the more recent ones, the last of which is last Friday. You can see the curve. As the Fed has continued to hike, the front end has moved higher, the curve has remained very inverted, that's meaningful for us and for any levered investor.
I'll say more about that in a minute, but basically it tells you, you know, through hedging and using, say, for instance, swap instruments, you can lock in very attractive net interest margin levels using those types of instruments. In any event, the curve has continued to steepen or invert, rather, and that's true in both the Treasury nominal curve as in the swap curve. Slide seven. These are just pictures of the 10-year inch, notional and cash, nominal cash, and then the 10-year SOFR swap. Over the course of the quarter, rates were drifting higher, and in spite of that, as I said, mortgages have actually had a decent quarter, even with the rise in rates. Moving on to slide eight, I'll just focus on the bottom of this page.
This is the spread of a current coupon mortgage to the 10-year Treasury. There are many such measures that people look at. You can look at the 5 -10 blend or just at a curve, they all pretty much tell the same picture. I think if you look at the bottom, this, this goes back to 2010, and this gives you some very good perspective. You can see from, say, 2013 through the pandemic, that the spread was fairly stable. We had a spike in March, but more meaningfully, if you look to the most recent- more recent history, last fall, in October, that spread got as high as 190, but in late May, we reached 200.
As I said, when we had the debt limit impasse, while it didn't appear to be something that would- you would consider mortgage market related, it was during that period that mortgage spreads hit their widest level and cycle high through this current episode. And so that was meaningful, and that was something that caused us to take several actions, which I'll describe in a few moments. Moving on, slide nine. This just shows you the 5/30 curve. There are many, many other points on the curve you can pick. Most common would be twos, tens, or the spread between Fed Funds and tens. They're all inverted. In the case of twos, tens, we've- the cycle high so far is negative 110.
We were as high as 105 this week, although this week, in the last two days in particular, that has steepened. Steepened as in less negative, but still very much inverted. Moving on to slide 10, this just shows you the size of the Fed balance sheets and bank holdings, and we describe the details of what we mean when we refer to bank holdings in the note below. The takeaway is that you're seeing a normalization, as the Fed likes to refer to it, of their balance sheet. In other words, they expanded their balance sheet in response to developments that occurred in 2020, and they're now, through quantitative tightening, letting that balance sheet run off or normalize.
Bank balance sheets just follow, because after all, when the Fed is reducing their balance sheet, they're reducing reserves in the system, and banks tend to mimic what they do, both on the way up and down. Now turning to slide 11. This is more mortgage market specific. As you can see in the top left, and remember, these are absolute price changes, not necessarily total return or total return versus some benchmark, but just price change with all prices normalized to 100 at the end of the last quarter. As you can see, all coupons are down in price, which makes sense given the moving rates. The performance was not uniform, and as I mentioned, in late May, the spreads got quite wide and have since recovered somewhat.
You could argue that these price movements are exaggerated to the downside, reflective of that spread widening. On the bottom left, you see rolls, the dollar roll market, often a source of income in the levered mortgage space and otherwise. You can see that all of these rolls are essentially non-economic. The only roll that has any positive, even a drop, is the 6.5 coupon as of this morning. The rest are all negative. The alternative to TBAs is usually a specified pool market. If you look in the top right, you get a picture of that.
Keep in mind that, as I said, on April 18th, the FDIC liquidation started, so we've had substantial selling of mortgages by the FDIC, and almost every bond that they sell is of some form of a specified pool, even if it's just seasoned. They just all have a pay-up. You've had tremendous supply. The initial reaction to the FDIC liquidations where TBAs widened, as you would expect, and so the pay-ups initially didn't look so bad, and that's just really because the benchmark was lower. They've since stabilized, and as I said, those liquidations are going very well. We're probably 80% plus percent through, probably be done comfortably before this quarter is over, and it'll be interesting to see how those markets behave once we don't have, you know, $3 billion or $4 billion of supply every week.
But again, that market has held up quite well, considering the size of those liquidations. Again, it was over $61 billion of supply just in the pass-through market. Turning to slide 12, this is a measure of vol, three month by tenure, vol. Obviously, mortgages are an asset that is very much impacted by levels of volatility. The short takeaway here, as you can see, is that vol is normal- normalized or not normalized, I guess it's moderated somewhat since late March or late May. But keep in mind that this level is still over 100. For reference, during the last decades, up until the pandemic occurred, the average level for that period was about 72. We're well above that. Volatility is still elevated.
Just, you know, we're kind of at a local low, as opposed to a local peak. Turning to slide 13, as I talked about mortgages earlier, you can see on the left-hand side, these are LIBOR slash SOFR OAS levels, and as you can see, they're extremely elevated as of late, and they appeared to peak in late May, and then recover in June, consistent with what I said earlier. Keep in mind that prior to the pandemic, these levels were all negative. Even after the, the pandemic, when the Fed was in the midst of QE, these numbers were negative. We've moved a long way, and as a result, the mortgage market, while it's been painful at times of late, over the last year and a half, performance-wise, the asset class is very attractive.
Turning to slide 14, these are just returns across, you know, our markets and other components of the aggregate index. Even the S&P and of course, you know, those mortgage investors, certainly ones that are focused exclusively on mortgages, a number of investors are invested across multiple asset classes, and so therefore, the returns across these things matter to them and therefore us, because they are large players in our market. As you can see in the second quarter, the best returns were the riskiest assets, high yield, emerging market, high yield in the S&P 500. All the other components of the fixed income markets were either very modestly positive in the case of emerging market, investment-grade debt or negative, but not materially so. Looking at the year-to-date numbers, again, the riskiest assets have had the best returns.
Otherwise, everything's fairly uniform. The spread between the best and the worst is quite small. The best returns year to date are investment-grade corporates. While that's not been, unfortunately, not mortgages, going forward because of investment-grade corporates doing as well, mortgages look fairly attractive versus that asset class. As a perfect segue to go to the next slide, where we show spread levels across the same large investment grade, and some investment-grade fixed income market. I'm just going to focus at the top of the page.
If you look at the agency, MBS and corporates, the reason I'm focusing here is that to the extent money managers are active in the market, and they are the largest, most active at the margin, player today, because the bank, community and the Fed are largely absent, so money managers are relevant for us. As if you look at spread products, in other words, assets that trade with spread to treasuries, the two largest buckets are the agency mortgage market and the investment-grade corporate market. Relative attractiveness is important. Just look at a few points or columns in this slide. If you look at the column labeled 2021 year-end, you can see that corporates were quite a bit wider than mortgages.
If you look a little to the right, you can see that, you know, we had a very stressful 2022. Those spreads were much wider. They converged. If you look to the left, December of 2022, you can see again that those levels, while they're off the tight or the wides, they had tightened. They're still very much in line with one another. If you look at the current level, you can see that mortgages are quite a bit wider. That's, you know, not been so good for performance year to date. Going forward, the asset class, the mortgage asset class, does look relatively attractive. That should bode well for the sector going forward. Is the reason for that we are very constructive on the market over the balance of 2023 and beyond.
Slide 16 just shows you the refinancing picture, so to speak. On the bottom of the page, you can see the percent of the market that's in the money, which is essentially 0. It's about 2%, not surprisingly, given where mortgage rates are. I would call your attention to the top slide on the right. That's what we call the primary-secondary spread, or the spread between a newly originated mortgage and a benchmark treasury or swap. You can see it's been volatile of late, but it's also at fairly high wide levels.
To the extent that the market turns and we see the Fed moving from a tightening bias to an easing bias, that would, of course, be a beneficial development for the mortgage banking universe because they would be in a position to start doing refinancing, which as you can see, has been negligible. The fact that those spreads are wide means they have room to tighten. You know, we've said throughout our last few earnings calls that we are, have a very negative view on current coupon, recently originated mortgages.
This is just another reason where we would think the convexity could prove to be a real challenge, especially, you know, in this, in this case, the ability of this primary-secondary spread to tighten and allow mortgage rates available to borrowers to come in and just make that section of the universe that much more refinanceable. And that's just an aside, but I just wanted to point that out. Now turning to our financial results on slide 18. I'm of course, going to focus on the left-hand side, and this is the same slide we've had for several years. As I'm sure most of you are keenly focused on the left side, the net income excluding realized and unrealized gains and losses. As you can see, that number is -$0.34, and we're paying a $0.48 dividend.
The question in your mind is: how can that be the case? I'm just going to walk you through it. Starting with the net portfolio income of negative $8.7 million, that's roughly $0.22 negative. Add in the expenses of $4.819 million. That's another $0.12. That gets you to your negative $0.34. However, we use fair value accounting, which means that we do not capture premium amortization or discount accretion in our income figures. That's still very much relevant because we do own these securities, generally at a discount in the current environment. The accretion to par of our discount securities was approximately $4.9 million in the current quarter. That's a positive $0.12, but much more materially our hedges.
Again, we don't use hedge accounting, even though we do actively hedge. We use hedge accounting for tax purposes only. Our hedges are very much in the money, and that added about $23.5 million of income or offset to interest expense, which is about $0.59. When you factor in those two items, that gets you to a positive $0.37 again, versus a $0.48 dividend. There's still a shortfall. I will note that during the quarter, we did issue a little under $50 million of equity through our ATM program. To increase our leverage by approximately one turn. We used the proceeds to buy a combination of 30-year, 5.5 and 6 securities, and we were able to hedge those positions using interest rate swaps predominantly.
As I mentioned earlier, with the curve inverted, you know, we could lock in basically funding through those hedges, such that we had a blended net interest margin on those newly acquired assets of just over 100 basis points. That'll add about $0.025-$0.03. That is going to close that gap some. I'll speak more to this in a few moments, but, just want to point out that the gap is obviously $0.34 negative. We're much, much less than that. We did do this add here, in the very, very late stages of the quarter, so it's not reflected in these numbers at all.
Going forward, all else equal, we would be at around $0.40 versus the -$0.34 or even the $0.37 we had this quarter. That's just the one thing I want to point out to you, what we were able to do at the end of the quarter, and then I'll speak more about our current positioning and how we see, see things going forward in a moment. Running through the balance of the slides. Slide 19, this is just a picture of our net interest margin. Obviously, with the curve inverted, and the Fed rise- raising rates, it's, you know, we're at a local trough and actually a long-term trough in that regard. Slides 20 is more or less the same. Slide 21 is our leverage ratio.
I want to speak to this. We've spoken in the past that the blue line represents our, what we call adjusted leverage. That's basically just our repo balance divided by our shareholders' equity. As you can see, it was 8.6 at the end of the most recent quarter. We also use TBAs, or in our case, hedges of TBA, so shorts of TBAs, to adjust that figure. Late last year and earlier this year, we were short a substantial amount of TBA, and our economic or at-risk leverage was much lower. We had said that if we saw the market opportunities as being extremely attractive, which they have been of late, that we could reduce our TBA short, in effect, increase our leverage, which is what we did in this quarter.
By simply just buying back these TBA shorts and the most recent add that I mentioned, we were able to take our leverage higher, which we did, and it's obviously to take advantage of these extremely attractive levels in the mortgage market. We do have some small, more additional room to do so, but we did take a substantial step this quarter. Moving on to slide 22, our positioning on the left side, there's really nothing to say here. It's basically unchanged. With rates as high as they are, there's not much value in IOs other than carry, very little ability to offer a, a hedge component of their performance. As a result, we have a heavy, heavy skew towards pass-throughs. Now I'll talk about our portfolio characteristics.
On slide 24, we show our portfolio on the top half of the page. As has been the case for some time, it's heavy skewed towards fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, approximately 97.5%. As you can see, we've added 5.5s and 6s. All other coupon buckets are basically unchanged from last quarter other than payoff. The change in the outstanding balance there just reflects pay downs over the course of the quarter. We did add substantially to the 5.5 and 6 bucket, and we took our weighted average coupon from about 3.56% to 3.83%. We have taken that higher.
As I said, we may do so more in the future, but I, I want to table that conversation just for a moment. Otherwise, with respect to the portfolio, there has been no changes in the post-quarter end, so we haven't done anything in Q3 yet. Slide 25 shows our speeds. Obviously, in a substantial discount environment, these levels are quite low. If you look at the most recent quarter, which is the bottom left, that's June. This reasonable speeds, our securities were paying around 6 CPR in the 3% coupon and a little higher in the three-and-a-half bucket.
That may be the cycle high since we're kind of at the peak seasonal, you know, so turnover and the like, and you get decent yields on the assets with those speeds, but I would not expect those to change meaningfully in the near term. Going through slide 26, this is just more of the same. Mortgage rates are very, very high. The orange line there in our turnover, our paydowns expressed as a percent of the outstanding principal balance, are quite low, and you would expect that to remain the case until rates turn around and go the other way. Slide 27.
This is a picture of our repo borrowings by counterparty, and as you can see, we have quite what I call effective spreading of the exposure across many, many counterparties, diversity. No single counterparty is over 8%. We've continued to do that for a number of years and try to avoid concentration, while at the same time maintaining access to more than adequate funding and a large number of counterparties. On the right-hand side, we see our funding cost, 1-month SOFR, which is kind of hard to make out there. That's a light gray line. The red line is basically our cost of funds, and as you can see, it's risen quite steeply and then continued to rise as we move through 2023, although at a slower rate.
Importantly, if you look at our economic cost of funds, and this is where the impact of our hedges come into play, you can see it's basically peaked and is stabilized. Unless we were to grow the portfolio substantially, that number would be expected to stay there. I've spoken at length on prior calls about the dollar amount of hedges that we have that are been closed out, but for federal income tax purposes, will still impact our taxable income this year and next, and actually years after. We have substantial gains from those hedges available to offset increased interest expense. So this number will has the ability to stay that way for quite some time. Now, turning to our hedges, this is an important slide.
As we mentioned that in late May, when mortgages got very, very wide and, you know, the cycle wides, I said that we had taken some steps. I mentioned the fact that we'd bought some assets, but the other thing we did was on the hedge side. What we did was we moved a lot of our hedges from mortgages, TBA shorts, which you see in the bottom left. We were at negative $875 million, now we're at -$350 million, and we moved those to rates, thinking that mortgages could not get meaningfully wider. We wanted our hedges to be more rate-driven than mortgage-driven. Also, we moved more on the out the curve.
What we've seen over the last couple of months, whenever you get some softer data, like so we had a softer CPI number last month or a Nonfarm Payroll, as is typically the case, the most reactionary point on the curve is the five-year. The five-year point of the curve is typically the most sensitive to changes in the direction of rates. We think that eventually, when and if the Fed does pivot and starts to ease, that you'll see a steepening of the curve, which will be led by the five-year. We would not want to be using the five-year as a hedge. We'd much rather use longer-dated Treasuries, less of them because they have more duration, but we wanted to move the hedges further out the curve.
If you look at the top left, for instance, you see in our futures position, our allocation to the five-year Treasury note future was reduced substantially. When we moved our TBA hedges, we moved them into either 10-year note futures or ultras or swaps. If you look at the top right side of the page, you can see our swap position went from $1.674 billion to $2.15 billion, approximately a 40% increase. We've moved our hedges, again, this was in late May, away from mortgages into rates and further out the curve, and we think that is a, a very ideal positioning for an eventual pivot and reversing of the direction of rates.
Once again, given the nature of the curve as inverted as it is, you can lock in very attractive funding, even in this high Fed Funds environment, and well north of 100 basis points is available. With respect to post QM, we've done very little. There was some slight changes to our swaption positions. We basically converted one of our forward vol pairs into a forward starting 10-year swap. Again, consistent with what I just described above. That's basically it. I would just say in summary, that our portfolio positioning, as I said, we still have a very low or low coupon bias. We did add opportunistically to some higher coupons.
May do so again at the margin in the future, if conditions are favorable, although we don't view those assets as long-term core holdings because we think that they will do very poorly, if the market were to turn around and rates were to rally. We are very, very comfortable with our current hedge positioning, like the fact that we've moved mostly from mortgages to rates and where we are in the curve, and that we have a very constructive view on the market, certainly over the long term. We think mortgages have the opportunity to do extremely well over the balance of this year and next. It may not occur in the very short term, but we have a very constructive long-term view on this sector with our positioning and with our hedges.
With that, I will turn the call over to the operator, and, I'll take any questions.
Thank you, Mr. Cauley. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you do have any questions, simply press star one. If you do find that your question has already been addressed, you can remove yourself from the queue by pressing star one again. We'll take our first question this morning from Matthew Erdner of Jones Trading.
Hey, good morning, Bob. Could I get your thoughts on the supply, demand, and spread dynamic after the FDIC sales are complete, given that the banks are kind of out of that market at this point?
Yeah, it's going to be. That's a hard one to guess. I mean, the market, as I said, it's gone well. The auctions have gone well. From what we don't have direct access to the information, but from what we can gather from those that do, it seems that the money manager community, which I kind of alluded to on the call, is kind of the critical marginal buyer of mortgages, with banks and the Fed on the sidelines. They appear to be at pretty extreme overweights. That being said, the sector is still attractive on a relative basis versus at least investment-grade corporates, if not other sectors. I don't think you get a whipsaw tightening, but I don't know that you, you probably get some gradual tightening. I just don't think it'll be a lot in the near term.
Do you have thoughts on it?
No, I, I, I totally agree with that. I think no matter what measure you look at, just nominal spreads, like our current coupon to yield to 10-year treasury yield, slide, or if we're looking at it on an OAS basis or relative to other spread products, which mortgages are obviously still wide. I think that once some of this uncertainty around the FDIC goes away, as it has gone away over the last, you know.
month or so that, you know, we, we would expect to see a, a gradual tightening. I, I think your, your, to your point, there, you know, banks have yet to reemerge, and become, you know, players. I don't think we're going to see anything dramatic. We still really like mortgages here. We don't think they've had the opportunity to perform, particularly on a spread duration basis. That's why we've kept our focus on lower coupon, longer duration assets that will, you know, can, benefit from, spreads grinding tighter over time.
Thank you. That's helpful. Then, sorry if I missed this, but did you provide a book value update quarter to date?
No, we did not. I'm sorry. It is very close to unchanged. As of Wednesday, we were probably slightly positive. Yesterday, we had a widening, especially in the afternoon, so we gave back some, probably took us to slightly negative on the quarter. Before I came in here, it looked like we were green. I would say ±1% is where we've been for about the last week.
Awesome. Thank you, guys.
Yep.
Thank you. We go next now to Mikhail Goberman at JMP Securities.
Hey, good morning, guys. Hope everybody's well.
Good morning.
Just wanted to get quick thoughts on how you guys see the specified pool market going forward versus the TBA dollar rolls?
Well, it's, it's certainly been under duress, so to speak, as I said, with the FDIC liquidations. You know, everything that's being auctioned is essentially a specified pool. In addition to that, we've had, while they're smaller than we've seen in the past, but we still are seeing cash window lists from Fannie and Freddie, insane amounts of supply and levels of held in. Also, all that occurring while rates are very, very high. I think it all bodes well. We don't have the technical squeeze that we had when the Fed was doing QE to keep the TBA market hot, and that's probably not coming back, so we're kind of left with the specified pool market.
Those went into the indices last year, so all the money managers out there that run against the index have to own them, and I think that's bode well. That's, that's definitely been a benefit during this most recent period without bank participation. I would say that given they've weathered quite a storm, I would say I'm reasonably optimistic. I don't think you're going to see a material move, I just don't think that it's going to be more of a slow, gradual, positive performance, I guess I would say.
Yeah, I, I agree with that, and I think that, you know, really there's a, there's a large bifurcation in the specified pool market between some of the lower coupon universe that was produced over the course of the last, you know, 10 years or so, that has been popping up on these liquidations and the more recently produced current coupon assets. I, I, I don't have a high degree of confidence that what's been produced in the last year and a half or so is in the specified pool form, is going to be particularly, you know, great in term, you know, of, of convexity protection, both in a rally or a sell-off. On the other side of that coin is the older stuff is, I think, very attractive from a convexity viewpoint.
There's not a lot of pay-up in that universe because it's at such a discount, huge upside into a big rally and not a meaningful amount of extension, you know, into a continued sell-off or, you know, inflation scare or something. I, I think that those comments, you know, can be seen in, in our positioning as well.
Yeah. I would just add to that is, they're easier to hedge. you know, we talked about, you know, the ability to use the inversion of the curve to lock in longer-term funding. you know, when you're owning something with an $86 or $84 price, it really can extend a lot, so you can use longer 10-year Treasuries to hedge. Also with respect to the more recent production current coupon, if you look at the, the collateral that's being produced, the gross WACs are extremely high. You know, they're running 95 to 105 basis points over the net coupon. you know, if you're buying a six, it's a low seven or a very high six gross WAC.
I mentioned primary-secondary spreads are very wide, and they may be for a while, but if the market ever turns and goes the other way and mortgage banker industry has to reengage, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there to go after. You know, that stuff is going to exhibit poor convexity, because in a rally, it's, it's not going to tighten materially because speeds are going to be fast as they move into a bigger premium position. That's just going to really inhibit their upside, especially relative to, as Hunter just mentioned, the lower coupons, which have very favorable convexity. You know, it's, it's somewhat painful in this environment to continue to have such a bias, and, and we have mitigated that some, but we just think net, net long term, that that's where you want to be.
You know, it's obviously always a challenge to try to time the market. You know, you, you can't just say, "Well, I'll just sell out of all those high coupon mortgages when the market turns." You don't, you don't get an email the day before it happens and say, "Sell now.
Right.
You know, it's kind of hard to do.
Kind of with that in mind, I'm just thinking about leverage and, and seeing, your, you know, eight, eight turns right now, kind of in the in between the historical range of 6 and 10. If, you guys see, you know, the opportunities that you hope to see going forward to help, you can ratchet that leverage up a bit. Could we potentially see a sort of drift towards a 9 and 10 range if we get a good amount of spread, spread tightening?
Yeah, you can. At 10, maybe not, but, you know, we've been in the mid-9s before. We could do that. We, we have two ways of getting there. The one big step we already took, which is where we got rid of a lot of the TBA shorts when mortgages got to very wide levels. Then we, you know, raised some equity, but also added to our balance sheet, just through purchases. Yeah, we could go higher. I mean, I don't think it's meaningfully higher, but we could. You know, we're at a wide level now, so, I mean, this arguably is the time to do that. Yeah, we could go a little wider, but I don't think meaningfully. Higher leverage, I should say.
All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Appreciate it.
Yep.
Just a reminder, star one, please, for questions. We go next now to Christopher Nolan at Ladenburg Thalmann.
Hey, guys.
Hey, Chris.
Bob, on your comment, you mentioned $0.40 per quarter going forward. Was that including the discount accretion and the hedge income that you were discussing?
Yeah. Basically, I kind of walk you through from the -$0.34, added back accretion, I think it was $0.12, added back the hedge, which was $0.59. That got you to $0.37. That, that was for that quarter. I mean, obviously, this quarter is not necessarily going to be a mirror image of that, but. With the additional assets we added, that got to about $0.40. There's still a slight gap there, at least for GAAP purposes, no pun intended. As I said, for hedge purposes or for tax purposes, you know, we have a lot of legacy hedges that were closed years ago that still cover this period. Just to kind of refresh your mind how that works, say, say you entered into a 10-year swap today, and you designated that as a hedge for tax purposes.
A year from now, you close out that position, and let's say that the open interest at the time you closed it out was $10 million. For GAAP purposes, you would have recorded that $10 million mark-to-market gain, and that would be the end of it. For tax purposes, that $10 million is applied to the balance of the hedge period, that period being the day you close it till the end of the maturity date of that swap. If I closed out a 10-year swap one year from today, I would apply that $10 million as an offset to interest income for the period beginning one year from today and ending 10 years from today.
We have a lot of those hedges that have been closed, and we had open interest, positive open interest in those hedge positions, and they're available to offset interest in spent in the periods of those hedge periods. I, I don't have the numbers in front of me. I think we provide them at year-end, but those numbers are, you know, in the low hundreds of millions of dollars for the balance of all of those hedges. They apply so much per year for the next few years. From a tax perspective, it's a lot different. From GAAP, you know, it's, you know, it's just whatever you're realizing in that particular period. There's no application of that position over any future period. It's all captured in the current period.
You know, we're showing approximately a $0.40 positive net interest margin for this Q2 only, but, you know, you know, for tax, it's a lot different. I think you can think about it a little bit, too, if you look at our hedge positions, you know, all of those, we have like $1 billion worth of, of, T-note futures shorts on. That, that's been a consistent part of our portfolio mix forever. The, the thing about those instruments is they don't play out quite like a swap does. I mean, we have swaps that we put on, you know, sort of at those cycle lows as well, that are, you know, around 100 basis points, pay fixed, and we're receiving, you know, SOFR, well into the 5s now, right?
If you think about the dynamics that took place that made those swaps go into money by so much, where we're realizing that positive income value as the life of the swap plays out, and that's, we've had those same types of gains in those T-note futures as well. The nature of the beast is, they don't pay, you don't, you don't have an income component to those where you're, where you're, you know, paying a fixed rate and receiving float. You're just rolling them, and every time you roll them, you have a capital gain that you tuck away, that you're going to use to, you know, offset your interest expense for tax purposes, you know, over the life of the underlying instrument, which is a five-year note or a 10-year, something like that.
For tax, it's a little easier to get your head around where, you know, how those different types of hedge instruments, you know, mimic one another for offsetting interest expense for federal income tax purposes.
Given all that, where, where do we stand with the dividend? Should we view, you know, the dividend sustainability to be somewhat detached from core EPS or GAAP EPS?
Yeah, I mean, we haven't said anything. I don't want you to read any too much, but yeah, I mean, we-- not that it can never change. Our dividend has certainly changed in the past, but given, you know, where we are at the moment in terms of that, you know, our positioning in the portfolio, as we mentioned, we're kind of comfortable with this lower coupon bias. We may add at the margin some higher coupon securities to close that gap some if we see an opportunity to do so. We think that the modest shortcoming on-- in that regard is offset by the much greater price appreciation potential of those assets versus the higher coupon securities, which offer
greater current income, but in our minds, much lower long-term total return opportunities. You know, if you look over the next year, total return, the lower coupon securities may give you a little less income, but we think they offer much higher price, potential price return, and therefore higher total rate of return over that horizon. I think we, the way you think about it also bounces around as sentiment for what the Fed's going to do next bounces around. I mean, it wasn't all that many weeks ago when we had, you know, cuts baked into twenty- to this year in the, you know, the third and the Q4 , maybe not the Q3 , but definitely the Q4.
You know, now, you know, we're the market's kind of taking the view that we're gonna have more of a soft landing, I think, and maybe rates can stay higher for longer. The point of all that is just that in terms of the dividend, you know, we don't, we definitely don't wanna put our shareholders through any unnecessary pain. If there's, you know, if we're looking at Fed cuts in the next, you know, 6 to 12 months, then, you know, we don't under earning dividend is not as much of a problem for us, you know, versus a time. If it's gonna be if we think it's going to be higher for, you know, a long period of time, and we'll perpetually be under earning.
I think there's a little bit of latitude for us in terms of the way that we think about cuts. It doesn't always have to be, you know, we can pull forward some of the Fed expectations and, and, and kind of continue to think that way.
All right. Thanks for the word. That's it for me.
Alright Chris.
Thank you. Just a final reminder, ladies and gentlemen, any further questions this morning, please press star one at this time. Mr. Cauley, it appears we have no further questions this morning. I'd like to turn the conference back to you, sir, for any closing comments.
Thank you, operator, and thank you, everybody, for taking the time to listen in. To the extent another question comes to mind later, that you didn't have a chance to ask today, feel free to call our office, or if you happen to listen to the replay and you have questions, we'll be glad to take any and all questions. The number at the office is 772-231-1400. Look forward to your questions, and if not, we look forward to talking to you at the end of the next quarter. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you, Mr. Cauley. Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude the Orchid Island Capital Q2 Earnings Conference. I'd like to thank you all so much for joining us and wish you all a great day. Goodbye.