Welcome to this week’s episode of Optimal Insights. In this episode, Jeff McCarty, James Cahill, and Kevin Foley explore the effects of the government shutdown on market data, the Fed’s evolving stance on rate cuts and quantitative easing, and the mechanics of MBS pricing and trade execution. Special guest Justin Monahan from Tradeweb offers a deep dive into how liquidity and transparency are maintained in the MBS market.

Key Topics Covered:

• Government Shutdown Impact: Delays in jobs data, alternative data sources like the Chicago Fed’s CHURN model, and implications for unemployment tracking.
• Federal Reserve Policy: Rate cut expectations, inflation trends, and commentary from Fed Governor Michelle Bowman on quantitative easing and MBS runoff.
• MBS Market Mechanics: Justin Monahan explains Tradeweb’s role in liquidity, price transparency, and trade execution in the TBA and specified pool markets.
• Market Drivers: Treasury movements, ETF inflows, bank buyer activity, and supply-demand dynamics influencing MBS pricing.

Tune in to gain valuable insights to help you stay ahead and maximize your profitability in the ever-evolving mortgage landscape.

Optimal Insights Team:

• Jeff McCarty, Vice President of Hedging and Trading Product, Optimal Blue
• James Cahill, MSR Account Manager, Optimal Blue
• Kevin Foley, Director of Product Management, Optimal Blue

Special Guest:

• Justin Monahan, Agency MBS Product Manager, Tradeweb

Optimal Blue Production Team:

• Executive Producer: Sara Holtz
• Producers: Matt Gilhooly & Hailey Røise

Commentary included in the podcast shall not be construed as, nor is Optimal Blue providing, any legal, trading, hedging, or financial advice.

Mentioned in this episode:

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AI at Optimal Blue - OI

Welcome to Optimal Insights. I'm your host, Jeff McCarty, Vice President of Hedging and Trading Product at Optimal Blue. In today's episode, I'll sit down with Justin Monahan, Agency MBS Product Manager at TradeWeb, where we'll discuss how TradeWeb provides liquidity and transparency in the mortgage-backed security markets. And as always, we'll check in with James Cahill and Kevin Foley for look at what's happening in the markets today. Our clients and industry partners have long relied on Optimal Blue for trusted insights and commentary,

And these podcasts are an evolution of our commitment to keeping the industry informed. So we have a great episode today. As mentioned, we're going to be speaking from Justin at TradeWeb, really about what makes the NBS market tick and how TradeWeb provides transparency and other tools, the ability to execute trades, pricing insights, lot of great tools in this liquid market that we have for mortgage backed securities.

And then we'll get into some of the implications of the government shutdown But first, just a quick look at the data. So we have the OBMMI sitting at 6.244 as of the end of the week last week, 10 year at 4.15. So really for the past two weeks since the Fed announcement a couple of weeks ago,

we've really been pretty flat. You we had a little bit of a bump up in rates, but then we've been pretty flat since then. leaning one way or the other. talk a little bit closer about which way we think will be headed later, looking forward to those discussions. Let's jump in.

All right, welcome Kevin and James.

Good to be here.

Thank you.

So let's jump right into kind of the major news of the week, which is obviously the government shutdown. James, you want to kind of talk us through what implications we're seeing because of the shutdown right now?

Yeah, so a few days into it, it doesn't look like this is going to be resolving any time immediately. So what we're kind of facing is that on Friday, the jobs report should have come out a number that everyone is really scrutinizing these days really kind of looking forward to seeing we didn't get it. The upside on that is the BLS has already said, hey, once the government opens back up, we're going to get that number to everyone pronto. Like it's going to be one of the first things that they get back out. So

you know, we'll have it once the government's open, but when that happens is the question. There is, you know, the good news is there's a couple other ways that we can kind of get to these numbers. The Dow publishes their own version of the numbers. They saw non-farm payroll at 51,000 and unemployment steady

at 4.3%. So kind of inline expectation, no major movements or changes. So pretty good there. With that, there's definitely a question around, hey, what do we do if the government doesn't open for a while? Where can we look to get this data? There've been some alternate views showing up. There's some talk about looking at Indeed and job postings. I think Kevin had a...

Some kind of interesting from the Fed.

funny enough, there is this new kind of real time unemployment report that the Chicago Fed just released at the end of September. don't think that this had anything to do with the government shutdown. But, know, the timing was was great in that, you know, this is this new way to get sort of real time information. not waiting for ⁓

the monthly, you know, BLS reports have a better understanding of unemployment rate and, you know, demand and supply for labor. this is by the Chicago Fed. It's something that they're calling churn, which is the Chicago Fed unemployment rates, now cast, I think.

was reading a little bit on the methodology because there's been a lot of conversation about the BLS reports and all the revisions that are happening lot of that survey based and there's been questions of, we need a new methodology? And this actually answers, I think, some of those concerns folks have had out there. And what they do is they model out what are called vectors or flow rates of

folks separating from their jobs and then also companies adding new employees. it's a bit of sort of an advanced analysis. They use a lot of the publicly available data, the private sector data as part of that. But they're also looking at things like Google search analytics. They're looking and other websites job postings. They're looking at organic postings of people who are

you know, going into like self-employment from, having, more full-time, a regular time job. that came out right before the government shut down. They actually have an updated report as of October 2nd. And the latest release of the final report for the end of September, which sort of be when we would expect the sub...

September jobs number, they had the unemployment rate at 4.34 % was their estimate. it's sort of, know, another data point that's out there, you know, fairly consistent with, what we were seeing, last month, last couple of months, so not a, not a lot of, dramatic movement, maybe from, from what we would expect, but I would encourage folks to go, go out there and check it out. It's a pretty cool, you know, interesting, you new way to stay on top of what the

unemployment rate is.

one of the things these types of tools highlight for me that we've talked about as we were talking about, you the firing of the BLS chief and, strength of those numbers is that there are a lot of other data points you can look at, is the largest, most transparent market in the entire world. are gonna get their data and indications on how the economy is faring. not just relying on one number.

And you know, the other thing kind of highlights for me is that, the fed is not just one person, is not just

Every fed region has their own very strong head of the fed as well as hundreds of employees and economists that are working through numbers and digging through numbers. They're not just waiting for that one BLS number to come out. They have all of their own models that they're looking at. So anyways, taking a step back, there's a lot of smart, hardworking people looking at a lot of data trying to figure out what's going on with the economy.

So there's my rah-rah speech the transparency of the US economy overall.

guess getting back into the government shutdown, let's talk about some few specific

we should be watching for or concerned about, about how the itself is affecting the economy.

there's just a couple of items with it. So first of all, last week, there's about employees who had taken the buyout earlier this all of them have been being paid by the government and that ends as of last week. So that is a number that's going to impact unemployment coming into the future. the closure of the government,

FHFA has been saying that they're going to be slower to processing, Ginny Pools. So that's more of a direct impact into our industry. But generally speaking, you know, the government shutdown does not stop what we're doing. The market's still moving. We're just still being originated and we're all still chugging along.

Yeah, there's always with the government shut down, there's always a discussion about who's an essential worker versus a non-essential worker and then who's going to versus who's going to have to keep working but not get paid and then get paid later on. is, a little bit of mess when you go through this, right?

Yeah, it's like you can only plan so much for the government shutting then the impact is going to end up being messy at some level.

Yeah. right. So back to the overall health of the economy, Kevin, you touched on the fact that the employment numbers that we do have are, they're okay-ish, right? There's no gun that is falling off a cliff. continues to remain elevated, but steady. Anything else to comment on there?

only other thing that I'd say is with this churn report that the Chicago Fed is doing actually publishing rate probabilities. So 4.3 % was our most recent reading and highest that they have published out 28%. in line up 0.1 % to 4.4%.

probability of that was 26%. So probably continue to expect some in over the next month, next couple of months. I think that's sort of what's priced in at this point. overall, the 10 years has been consistent. It dipped down close to

And looking at the CME, there is a projected, we're getting a rate cut in about 25 days now. So we are almost certainly getting that second one, even without data coming out this week, next week. It seems the Fed has mostly made up their mind is mostly signaling, yes, we're going for at least one more.

And what's the likelihood of that extra one then in December as well?

December one, it looks like it's 83%. So, you know, we're definitely getting one coming next month and looks like we're gonna get one in December as well so far.

Yeah, and I think core PCE is coming out like the day or two October Fed meeting. So we have already had our last core PCE inflation up to the meeting. you know, that's nothing really on the inflation side too much that's going to really change the trajectory and the data that's coming later this month.

One speech that I thought was interesting that we might highlight was from Michelle chair of board of governors of the Fed. interesting conversation where she thinks the Fed is right now and just the Fed's role in supporting the economy, particularly around quantitative easing.

Her views around the overall health of the economy are probably of right in line with kind of consensus right now, right? Which is that, employment is starting to deteriorate. We should probably start moving faster on cutting rates to address the employment situation. And that inflation, while stubbornly high is not necessarily at a risk increase further. you know, comfortable with inflation being a little bit the target knowing

lot of the issues right now are transitory around tariffs potentially and that the is deteriorating. But she did have some interesting around again quantitative easing and just the runoff securities on the Fed's portfolio, particularly around mortgage backed securities. And she actually argues that than

allowing mortgage backed securities to run off naturally, Fed should proactively to sell some of the mortgage backed securities in the Fed's portfolio. have not heard much of that. There's not much talk about that through the broader it is worth keeping an eye on.

Yeah, and obviously to tie that into the effect that that would have on mortgage rates. if the Fed were to accelerate selling mortgage-backed securities, that would widen the spread between Treasury and MBS and ultimately lead to, know, net-net, it would lead to higher interest rates. But I behind the statement, which I thought was really interesting, Jeff, is the Fed of picking

favorites picking winners and losers too much by expanding their holdings to really anything beyond just treasuries. component of that statement was focusing more on a treasury only balance sheet on the Fed. component of that was also not playing favorites amongst the term structure within the yield curve. So not trying to push

the 10 year down, let's say, you know, more than it should go down in order to help, you know, offset mortgage rates. The whole idea was you want to have neutral effect on the overall demand for the yield curve. you know, that means for shorter term securities, you want to buy a similar amount of shorter term securities as you would longer term securities so that you're not like playing favorites too much with the yield curve. So

Yeah, it was a very interesting statement. always appreciate when, you know, folks in the Fed issue statements like that publicly so we can get a better understanding of what their thinking is.

Yeah, you can't imagine that type of talk will be popular with the current administration. can't see this type of thinking gaining more traction as this administration, you know, adds more of quote, there are people to the Fed Board of Governors, but certainly worth keeping an eye on to see ⁓ if that gains traction again, you know, by dumping supply of mortgage backed securities in the market.

You're going to drive down prices and drive up rates relatively speaking. So, you know, as kind of overall rates in the broader economy go down, you're going to see mortgage spreads potentially widen if they were to actually implement this type of policy, which, you know, I think is unlikely, but it's still interesting to hear that talk out there.

I agree with what you're saying there, Jeff. It seems that that would be kind of antithetical to what the administration wants. Although it would address some of the mission creep Fed has been kind of accused of the past couple of years. Like, Hey, have we been picking favorites? Have we been stepping where we shouldn't? Should we step back and like get out of this? ironically it would address the mission creep, but it would push mortgage rates up, which is just not what the administration wants at all. So.

Mm-hmm.

Yep, yeah, for sure. I think like, your point, James, had that article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back that was like the gain of function policy from the Fed. this, yeah, to your point, this is exactly, I think what he's talking about there. But ironically or not, it's not in line with some of the other objectives of the administration in terms of their Fed and industry policy.

Yeah.

⁓ classic econ you're trying to move the direction one way and you've got three other things pushing back against you

Yep. Yep.

Alright good, anything else?

That's a good recap.

Yeah,

Yeah.

I just a lot of fed speak coming this week. Otherwise, you know, not too much data. hopefully when the government opens, we'll see quite a bit of it all at once.

We will be ready for it and ready to talk about it. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, James.

Thank you.

Thanks,

guys.

All right, so as promised, welcome in Justin Monahan. Justin is agency MBS product manager at TradeWeb on the institutional of the business. So yeah, Justin, thanks for joining us today.

Appreciate you guys having me on here.

worked for a number of years now, so excited get his expertise on we talk a decent amount on this podcast, ⁓ but excited to get a little bit more details, really kind of how the sausage is made. How MBS prices actually show up on a screen? How does that?

one of the main drivers of how loan pricing changes hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute business, getting a little bit of weeds a little bit more about TradeWeb is a financial technology company, a global leader in fixed income, and really from our perspective, kind of the de facto leader in the industry in terms MBS price discovery,

TBA trading, specified pool trading. maybe we just start there, Justin, you know, what does Trade Web do ⁓ in this industry and kind of more broadly?

so as Jeff said, we're a fixed income technology company. We've been around for over 25 years. The agency mortgage product was actually one of the anchor products founded when the company was outside of US Treasuries. So extensive tenure in this and very much a lion's share of the electronically traded.

portion of this in TBAs and an ever-growing presence in this agency-specified pool market as well. So we measure ourselves against Trace ever since Trace volumes became public. And Trace breaks down average daily volumes by dealer to dealer, dealer to customer, and then also on an ATS trading platform. Trayweb, on the institutional side, is not categorized as an ATS. But of the

dealer to customer market, is where my platform or our platform sits, represent about 90 % of that average daily volume in the TBA market.

Yeah. When you say dealer to customer market, that's it's probably where the majority of our listeners would be familiar with it. Right. So when we say, you know, we're trading 2 million UMBS 30 years, 6 % coupons in November with a broker dealer, often going to trade web do and execute that trade.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. So we have TBA platform is what's called an RFQ platform or request for quote. So all of our clients interact with the bulge bracket dealers. have 17 liquidity providers in the TBA market and a total of 31 in the specified pool market, which that number has been growing since 2020, since we launched the trading platform.

But request for quote, you can go up to four dealers at a time for immediate price transparency and execution. then really our bread and butter is the integration capabilities that we have an audit trail perspective, execution, and then straight through processing. So there's really very low touch for most of base in terms of manual trade entry.

Yeah, we see that a our products specifically and how we integrate with you and interact with you, whether it's our traders or our technology. again, a super important part of the process because that's ultimately the main driver loan price. So when we talk about how,

treasury prices move and how MBS prices move and how that affects the rates that offering to borrowers, we're getting those prices and executing those trades directly from you. So let's get in the weeds a little bit there and just kind of start with an example, right? we're talking about a six and a quarter note rate, that note rate is probably going into like a five and a half coupon.

go into trade web and we say, all right, right now, UMBS five and a half coupon is trading par and 20 ticks, a tick being the 32nd of a point. So, you know, par 0.625 in terms of prices, what, where does that price come from?

Yeah, so there is our composite is widely trusted as sort of the market standard for price transparency for TBAs. It is a dealer sourced composite. So any and all of those 17 liquidity providers can contribute markets to us. We have an algorithm that essentially analyzes in real time those market updates on the bid and offer side of the market. And what we essentially publish is the best bid and best offer within a standard deviation.

of what we're getting. So it is an indicative market. So it's not necessarily firm levels, as you probably have heard in other markets like US Treasuries and interest rate swaps, which are more of a streaming protocol where it's a dealer direct stream to clients and clients can execute or aggress on those levels. TVA market is still truly indicative. part of the, I would say, the function behind the scenes of what goes into those contributions is a reflection of what's happening in the wholesale market.

or the dealer to dealer market, which is more of a central limit order book model, where those are live executable levels. So if there's a cash market pictured in, let's just say, UMBS 36%, there's also usually coupon swap markets, right? So 50 basis point coupon swaps that you could ladder down and then come up with a theoretical mid-price and then a bid and ask price off of those individual legs.

So there's definitely each dealer probably has their own methodology of how they're doing this to arrive sort of at a generally the same level the rest of the market or the consensus. But that's sort of the things that are happening behind the scenes. There's also a combination of hedge ratios that are tracking treasury movements as well, right? And how you should materially up or down tick those TBA prices as well.

a lot going on there. I simplify that even a little bit more, you said, you've got an algorithm. looking at actual inputs, different sides of the market come up with this indicative price. Again, indicative being important because when we go in

actually trade these that might not be the price we get from a broker dealer reiterating that that that point the most liquid coupons. Obviously you're going to be pretty close. ⁓ If not exactly on top of that, right? Most dealers use that to determine then how they price. sometimes on those more illiquid coupons, might be not quite what you get when you call a broker dealer, when you go to trade them on trade web.

That's right.

we isolate, we run analysis on how accurate our composite actually is. actually, in the past two years or so, have had a really renewed focus on the data that's available to us, whether it is the composite data, trade data. And if we just isolate to current coupon mortgages that are traded outright, so as the example before, you're going to sell 2 million UM36s in November.

you go to four dealers at a time on the RFQ ticket, 95 % of that volume that transacts on our system is done within one 30 second of our mid price. So it is extremely accurate and that's why it's really widely accepted as kind of as the standard for the market.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It, know, it's accurate. It's trusted, which is good because, know, we, we use that, you know, the industry uses that price you, right? Not just to execute trades that they're using hedge their pipelines. They're using it to again, price their pipelines, price loans to the market to say, borrower,

you want a 6 % note rate, this is the price you're getting at this moment in time. If you want a 7.5 % note rate, this is the price you get. And all those dynamics that you're describing feed directly to what the entire industry is quoting to the borrower. So it's important that we have this trusted source of pricing that you provide.

share for sure.

All right, so, you know, the pretty good breakdown of kind of where prices come from, that shows up on the screen and then ultimately again flows through to say borrower pricing. happens from there? What are kind of the mechanics of when a trade actually occurs?

Sure, so we're at the front end of the trade lifecycle, right? So we have a lot of pre-trade tools that exist on the system, things like smart dealer groups, which will help you with selecting which dealers have a very high hit rate or which perform better for a specific type of client. at time of execution, both the liquidity provider and for the customer, kick off our post-trade process.

is really critical for the dealers because they have an obligation to report these trades to trace The guideline is as fast as possible within 15 minutes so with like the velocity and the amount of trades that you know That let's just say that the top five or six dealers are seeing on a daily basis It's really critical for this connection to work seamlessly then the client side to right is you want your risk in line?

as fast as practically possible. we send those execution messages typically down a fixed channel to wherever you're going to be holding those trade details. Most of the lifecycle after that is handled away from us. But that first piece is really important, the timeliness and the accuracy, to get all those details in and correct.

Yeah. one thing, you know, we touched on much of the market you see in control, but we should reiterate just how big this market is in general. talked about this a lot in the podcast, but this is a, you know, this is a huge market beyond treasuries. It's the fixed income portion of the market in the world. Right.

Yeah, so for context, our year-to-date average daily volumes on the system in TBA are 190 billion. think the total market, right, if we're looking at full on, I think it's in the realm of like 230 to 240 billion. Actually, it might be closer to 250 billion the last time I checked. So pretty substantial.

Yeah. So, I

mean, just a ton of, so having those processes that you described, in place, all those back end processes that happen after you say, hit that, $2 million trade, making sure that is tracked all the way through is of vital importance. So, so those kind of non-sexy things that you do on the back end, market work, make the mortgage industry, ⁓ liquid dynamic, you know, which becomes important all the way through to the borrower.

Yeah.

ultimately.

For sure.

All right. So that's a good lead in to maybe a few other things we wanted to touch on, right? It's not just that you're providing pricing, you're providing, you know, the ability to execute some of these, kind of standard trades. There there's other functions that trade web provides. Maybe you can touch on a few of those.

Yeah, so if we talked about that, let's just call it a hedge in sixes that you've traded a few months forward, right? Well, what are your options with that trade, right? You could deliver collateral into that. you, you securitize enough into that coupon, you could roll that position. So just doing a traditional dollar roll to move that forward. You could do a coupon swap if production has shifted up or down. as you go through, one of the nice things that we've done that's been a

trade protocol we've had around for a long time is our round robin, which is essentially an electronic version of an assignment of trade. And what's nice about that is it takes the operational of like having to make or take delivery of bonds away because you can just collapse open positions that you have like open longs and shorts that you may have on between different liquidity providers. So in the case where you sold again, six is forward in November.

let's just say come settle in the time, you're going to actually swap those into five and a half because that's where production has really lined up. So you traded that initial trade forward with a particular dealer. Now you do end up doing a 50 basis point coupon swap and you shift your hedge lower into five and a half. Well, that buyback of that hedge may be on with a different dealer. So before round robin or an assignment of trade, you'd have to take in bonds and deliver bonds out.

What Round Robin does, it allows you to step out of that trade and compress those. And you ultimately end up with a TBA pair off between dealers. But it's a riskless that is really, really efficient. We see about $50 billion in volume for this trade type on our system on a very regular basis. But the beauty of it is it allows the customer to go out and get the best level in the market to close those open positions out. it's very useful and widely.

utilize tool.

Yeah, it's a great tool. You know, again, very simply, just another way of providing liquidity the market to originators so that they can, as you said, you know, get the best price possible as you're getting out of the trade to be able to then handle that kind of the, you know, the dynamics of who you actually executed the trade with originally. So.

know a super liquid market already these types of tools provide more liquidity More efficiency in trading and ultimately, performance for the mortgage company better prices to the borrower So yeah, that's a great example and again just just great tools and how much goes into this market a lot of folks don't see

right, well, maybe we end on kind of what you see on in the market. What are some of the main drivers of backed security pricing on a daily minute to minute basis?

Yeah, there's a lot of, obviously mortgages are, it's a macro rate product, right? It's a spread product, but off of macro rates. So generally speaking, like any action in, know, US treasuries, particularly between like the five year and 10 year points on the curve are gonna drive price action. Now the spread to those points on the curve are really driven by supply demand technicals.

So if you've got different things, you've got like Fed cutting rates on the short end, you've got the growing presence of mortgage-related ETF inflows. So you could have really high demand over a certain timeline. So there's a lot of different levers which are going to drive the up-order, downward momentum of the TBA market. Specs are a whole different animal, but we'll keep it focused on the TBA world first.

Yeah,

no, we've done, we'll bring you back some time to get into specs in more detail. We have done a little bit of a breakdown of specified pools and why those are

Yeah, so those are things, again, we've hit on as well, know, looking you know, we obviously watch the 10-year closely our market, but there is a dynamic between the 10-year ⁓ and mortgage rates as well. know, how that changes over time or even on a is certainly interesting to watch.

Yeah. Yeah.

One of the other themes to write is, it's really it's the theme of supply and demand, but it's like, active are the bank buyers in this product, right? And that can really drive, basis tightening or widening, depending on how active they are and what products they're adding or shedding at a particular time series.

I think we actually talked about that a couple of podcasts ago Jim mentioned. think it's, you know, we talked a lot about dynamics, you know, this is a global market, right? But still, I think it's, 70 to 80 % of MBS holdings are still within the US, even though, you know, it is traded internationally. think that, you know, but mostly by, you know, those parties that you just mentioned.

Yeah. Yep.

All right. That was great, Justin. Thank you so much. A really good overview of kind of, again, as I said earlier, how the sausage is made, how does that price show up, all the other dynamics that go into trading mortgage backed securities that we talk about so much, but is nuanced, very complicated. And we need, you know, obviously someone like Trade Web there to provide that liquidity in the processes for us.

It's a big responsibility for us, it and we're grateful for the opportunity to where we sit in the market.

Great, so if anybody wants to get in touch with Justin or TradeWeb, we'll make sure we something in the comments LinkedIn, or certainly please feel free to reach out to us. So Justin, thanks again, great conversation. Thanks.

Appreciate it, thanks Jeff.

That's it for today. Thanks again to Justin Monahan from TradeWeb for joining us. Thanks, Kevin and James, as always. Join us next week for another episode of Optimal Insights, where we'll continue to provide you with the latest market analyses and insights to help you stay ahead. Check out our full videos on YouTube. You can also find each episode on all major podcast platforms. Thanks for tuning in to Optimal Insights.