The largest single-family mortgage REIT, Annaly Capital Management Inc., was the most actively traded stock on the NYSE Tuesday morning, the day after it announced the pricing of a secondary stock offering of about 120 million shares.
Roughly 99 million shares of NLY were trading on the New York Stock Exchange late Tuesday morning with the next most actively traded stock, Bank of America, trading at just around 58 million shares, according to Yahoo Finance.
Annaly was trading at just above $18 per share at press time. Its share price had averaged about $18.50 in the days leading up to the pricing announcement.
The company late Monday had announced the pricing of the 120 million shares at $17.70 for expected gross proceeds of about $2.1 billion before expenses. It plans to use the proceeds to buy mortgage-backed securities for its investment portfolio and for general corporate purposes, possibly including additional investments and the repayment of short-term indebtedness.
Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC is the lead book-running manager for the offering. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS Investment Bank and RCap Securities Inc. are joint book-running managers.
The market in general was somewhat volatile Tuesday morning.
“We do have some headwinds that could cap mortgage bond prices or push home loan rates maybe slightly lower or sideways,” Patrick Hennessy, senior financial analyst at the Mortgage Market Guide, told this publication in an interview early Tuesday morning. “Stock futures are weighing on bonds also.”
However, he noted that the Fed minutes release and note auction planned for early Tuesday afternoon create some uncertainty as to what rates might do later in the day.
The long-term rate-indicative 10-year Treasury yield, after falling below 2.9% briefly early Tuesday, as of late morning appeared to be hovering around or above 2.9%.
