In this episode of Optimal Insights, the team dives into key developments shaping the mortgage industry as we enter 2026. They cover labor market stability, Fed leadership changes, geopolitical tensions following U.S. action in Venezuela, and what these mean for rates and originators. The discussion also includes the December Market Advantage review, highlighting origination trends, non-QM growth, and secondary market dynamics.
Highlights:
Labor market and unemployment trends
Fed policy and leadership changes
Geopolitical developments and rate implications
Origination performance and non-QM opportunities
Secondary market and servicing trends
Optimal Insights Team:
Jim Glennon, Senior Vice President of Hedging and Trading Operations
Alex Hebner, Hedge Account Manager
Mike Vough, Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy
Brennan O’Connell, Director of Data Solutions
Production Team:
Executive Producer: Sara Holtz
Producer: Matt Gilhooly
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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Interestingly, purchase market, which we talked about it here, it's sort of been fickle. I think we're kind of like waiting to see where that, like what is going to be that threshold that we hit from a rates perspective.
That is sort of like the escape velocity for the purchase market to really start humming again, so we've been fickle, obviously the rate market has improved. And so we've seen the refi market, but purchase market has been tricky. so never really know what to expect December though. I think some pretty good reason for optimism.
Jim Glennon (:
Welcome to Optimal Insights. I'm your host, Jim Glennon, Senior Vice President of Hedging and Trading Client Services at Optimal Blue. 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. Let's dive into today's episode. Welcome everybody. Welcome to 2026. We a week here, so a little bit to talk about, although a little bit slow around the holidays in terms of data, but still a lot going on in
geopolitics and a little bit to talk about with the Fed. So we've got a great show for you today and just in the interest of making sure you know what to watch as an originator, as a capital markets person or just someone interested in the mortgage industry. We've got some great market commentary coming up. will also get to the market advantage. So as you know, market advantage is now part of the Optimal Insights podcast. We will touch on that with Brennan and Mike here right after the market update. Before we get to that, just in the way of data,
OBMMI 30 year fixed still dragging the bottom of the six is 6.14. The 10 year treasury is at 4.16. So seeing a little bit of compression continuously between those two numbers, just getting closer together, which is a good thing mortgage rates where you may not see treasury rates dip, but you may see mortgage rates continue to just reduce ever so slightly versus that benchmark number. volume, did see volume drop a bit right around the holiday. That's expected.
We hadn't seen it all of December, which we typically do see, but we did see it drop right around the holiday, which a lot of folks are on vacation. They're a visiting family. You wouldn't expect a ton of people to be locking loans, but there was some activity. We're about 50 % of normal, which around the holidays, what we usually would see 15 to 20%. 50 % is pretty healthy. Let's go check in with Alex and see what's going on with the market update.
Jim Glennon (:
Okay, we are here with Alex. We have ⁓ missed a couple weeks, one week of the podcast, two weeks data, but not much really has come out, right? Because we had the week of Christmas since our last podcast and then the week of New Year's. Obviously a lot to talk about that has happened, which we'll get to here in a minute. There's the news out of Venezuela. Let's just start with what did happen since the 22nd in terms of data.
what have we seen? We've, we've, we've seen initial claims numbers. We've seen continuing claims. as think, James pointed out last time, those are a little lumpy right now because of some of the government, uh, severance packages running out from some of the Doge stuff that happened earlier in the year. What else do you see there?
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah, think, initial jobless claims, they've been where, ⁓ aside from those kinds of lumps that we saw, coming out of the government shutdown numbers, which aligned with October, November payrolls. those were lumpy, which, which we can mainly attribute, we think to, layoffs from, from the Doge cuts and government cutbacks. the most recent numbers for initial jobless claims came out December 31st, at about 220,000 initial jobless claims, which is right in the range that we saw and talked about.
Jim Glennon (:
Whoa.
Alex Hebner (:
All of last year. Yeah. I mean, two 50 is that again, that red flag warning that we keep talking about. and I'd say two twenties on the lower end of the band that we generally see. So somewhere between like, you know, two 10 and two 40. no news is good news on that front. it's a nice weekly, ⁓ number that we get every week. but as of last week, it didn't, ⁓
point to too much distress in the labor market. We haven't seen the unemployment rate, as we know, tick up month over month. Uh, if the past three, four releases now, I think we're sitting four, three, four point 4 % or so on unemployment. and then the fed has been talking about wanting to address that. Uh, but for the time being, um, it seems to be at the labor market is in a stable position. If not, you know, the greenest of pastures.
Jim Glennon (:
Yeah. And we'll get the true survey number. Maybe the first real unemployment report that comes out on the right day since the government shut down, right? This week on Friday and expecting, I don't know, I guess I would call it lackluster, but still relatively healthy numbers coming out of that, that print, right? Expecting, let's see, what 4.5 headline number, which is right at the cusp of where
the Fed would really like to take action and then payrolls are expected to be about 57,000.
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah, yeah, right in there. mean, it'll be a weak reading regardless. ⁓ But yeah, it seems to be in line with what we've come to expect. And like you said, this one's coming on time. We're finally back on track for the time being, at least. There's whispers out there that we could see another government shut down. What got us back open last time was a continuing resolution to debate some of those issues that were highly contested back in October, November. In addition to that, they
provided funding through January 30th. So if they can't get additional funding resolutions passed by January 30th, we will see another government shutdown and the associated data latency that we saw with the last one.
Jim Glennon (:
Right? I mean, most of the drama is going to be around the Affordable Care Act, right? That was the one point that kept the shutdown going for so long and has now kind of kicked the can down the road. Now we're actually having to reckon with that before the end of this month.
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah.
Yeah. And it's the Affordable Care Act has gotten further than I thought that it would. But the Democrats were able to secure out of the last shutdown was they were going to vote on if they will address the Affordable Care Act. And they got the votes, believe, right before ⁓ Congress went on holiday for the holidays.
I think there were four Republicans that defected that got them across the line to ⁓ over more than 50 votes in the Senate. So they will be addressing it. ⁓ And it does seem to be something that they're going to have to address because the cost of health care, I think, at this point, crosses party lines on how the voters feel about it.
Jim Glennon (:
Big time. No, think folks were glad to see there a little bit of dissension. There are some folks breaking ranks at least temporarily for this issue because there didn't seem to be an end in sight. And to your point, we've talked about it on the podcast, like there are a lot of red states that heavily depend on the Affordable Care Act. A lot of small businesses, farm, agriculture, they don't have ⁓ the size or the scale, the economies of scale to have.
kind of the type of healthcare that some of us have in larger businesses. So they're hurting a lot of their voters potentially going into an election year, right?
Alex Hebner (:
Absolutely. Yeah, I think it would be a big sore spot for the Republicans heading into the election year if they were to not even address the Affordable Care Act. know, it still might not pass, but the fact that they've been able to bring it to a vote and debate it, think, ⁓ will help them in the long term. And I do see it passing with the dissentions that we saw, I think, four dissentions. you they got to 52, 53 votes, which is, you know, a few more than that 50 that they need. So.
I'm hopeful that they're able to get something done there. And if they're able to get some done on the Affordable Care Act, that seems to be the major roadblock. That's what Democrats were holding out for throughout the entirety of the last government shutdown. if they can get the Affordable Care Act done, I think they can get a budget done as well.
Jim Glennon (:
Very good. Good to hear. Yeah. Assuming that gets done. don't have another government shutdown. probably be focused on the Fed again. We talked about that on the last two podcasts, just, you know, the drama that happened in 25 and likely a lot of turnover coming in this year in 26. mean, what's been new over the past couple of weeks there? You got a couple of notes here. I mean, just generally speaking,
Should we be expecting a bit of just more of the lame duck situation or do we actually have some, activity here in the next few months?
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah. In regards to the fed, the big question mark remains of who is going to be pal successors. going to be Kevin Warsh or Kevin Hamill. know, that's kind of up to Trump at this point on who he's going to nominate. ⁓ You know, it seems like the headlines go back and forth as, you know, whispers come out to press. think the biggest change, and this is just a matter of routine at the fed is ⁓ the board of governors rotates through voting roles and.
Jim Glennon (:
Hmm
Alex Hebner (:
those roles exchange at the end of the year. And so we have new voting members this year. Beth Hammack of the Cleveland Fed, Lori Logan of the Dallas Fed, Anna Paulson of the Philadelphia Fed, and Neel Kashkari of the Minneapolis all going to be voting members this year. were previously just on the Board of Governors. And Collins, Goldby, Muslim, and Schmid are out as voting members. This is just a matter of routine on voting members cycling through from the Board of Governors.
I was looking at kind of the voting history of these new ones versus the old ones, know, how hawkish, how dubbish they are. ⁓ There's maybe a slightly more hawkish lean to them. Lori Logan and Neel Kashkari in particular lean hawkish. Paulson, the Philadelphia Fed is more dubbish, I don't really expect a major change there. These are all kind of holdovers pre-Trump era.
for the most part, and they're more of the older guard like palas, know, and keeping with Fed independence and such. So I don't expect them to vote radically different than the former ones, but again, it's a matter of routine. It's good to know that, you know, how the Fed works.
Jim Glennon (:
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
that's good information. think we forget that that does happen every year and thanks for doing that analysis. So sounds like you said, not a huge change or no expectation rate path is going to change because of the makeup of the voters on the board. So we'll have to wait to see who the new chairperson is, which certainly can change the tide significantly. Cause as we've pointed out in the past, when the Fed is
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah.
Right.
Jim Glennon (:
Kind of leaning one way over the fence, certainly if the chairperson is, that's the way that most members will then vote. Versus now where we kind of have this weird situation where we do have a little bit of a split
Alex Hebner (:
And then final point on the Fed is just, just Myron. Again, his position was temporary because Kugler left mid-year last year. And so he was just filling in for the remainder of Kugler's term. He will vote at the January meeting. I expect him to vote as he's been voting, voting for a 50 basis point cut. But Trump will then get to nominate an additional member of the Board of Governors there.
Jim Glennon (:
Gotcha. All right. So more to come on the Fed as we get into this first quarter. And I guess last but not least, Venezuela happened over the holiday, kind of when very few people were probably watching the news or, you know, the markets are closed. It was, you know, you wouldn't know it today. The markets are open today. You wouldn't know that there was a relatively major global political change.
over the New Year's holiday. And that was that essentially the US has taken control of Venezuela by arresting the sitting leader of Venezuela and likely some others. And where does that go from here? Right? We're kind of in, I guess, tenuous spot geopolitically, but it hasn't seemed to do much for the markets. But it is something that everybody needs to be aware of and paying attention to and probably reading into.
a bit more than what you've seen in the headlines over the last four to six months. Right. I mean, I we've all seen the videos of the, of the drug boats being blown up in the Caribbean, presumably headed towards the U S and so the, lot of the messaging messaging there was, drug trafficking, right. Is the reason that we were amassing military hardware off the coast of Venezuela. But now obviously, you know, if you read a little bit more into that, there, there is
an economic impact here. There's an economic consideration that has a lot to do with, with fuel, right? Oil and the U S dollar.
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah, absolutely. think, I mean, the Trump two presidency just in general, they've been far more, I think, prepared than the Trump one presidency. They've had the groundwork lane to get worked on across the board. And they're really kind of kicking off year two here from the foreign policy perspective with a very, ⁓ call it Teddy Roosevelt, ⁓ walk with a big stick, way of going about things. ⁓
But yeah, as to what you said, you know, just to make sure everyone's aware, you know, what the U.S. did was a limited strike inside Venezuela, managed to arrest Maduro and his wife, who are the, you know, the leader and the first lady of that country, extradited them to New York on drug trafficking and ⁓ weapons charges. And then...
So he will face trial in New York on those charges. We'll see what comes of that. But at the end of the day, it's not really about that so much as the fact that, you know, the leader of a foreign country has been extradited to the United States. What that means for that foreign country, you know, Trump has said, you know, we're in charge of Venezuela now. I wouldn't quite say that. mean, yes, we've taken the leader of the country, but there's still the entire, you know, ⁓ Maduro bureaucracy that's still running the day to day operations of the country. Right.
Jim Glennon (:
The government.
Alex Hebner (:
So it's really kind of a gray area at this point of what next? ⁓ The United States historically is extremely strong on, know, and overwhelming strikes as we were here. But it doesn't quite seem that we know what the next step is. Yeah, I'm with you. think that the drug trafficking story is nice politics, but Venezuela has the largest proven reserves in the world. It's right on our doorstep.
so yeah, I think, and I mean, Trump's been open about saying that if, you know, us will companies want to, you ⁓ invest, they need to put their own capital forward into Venezuela. ⁓ so don't think it's any secret what's going on there.
Jim Glennon (:
Invest in Venezuela.
Right. Yeah.
The whole story has just been super interesting at how it's been been able to keep the, the, the true plans quite secret. Meanwhile, everybody, like the news all over the world knew that, that we were amassing this hardware and 15,000 troops off of Venezuela, but nobody knew what was going to happen and when, and it maybe speaks to the, a bit of the erratic nature of the, the, of the administration right now and the element of surprise, but is anyway, interesting to watch. think obviously concerned for,
anyone involved in a conflict. sounds like this was relatively nonviolent, but there was certainly people killed, I'm sure, at least within Venezuela, just looking at the videos and the explosions and all, it's almost impossible that there wasn't. yeah, there's no, what is the next step? We've threatened other countries as well in regards to the narcotics coming into the US and that we could take action, although it does seem like we're focused squarely on Venezuela.
at the moment. then like you said, there's the whole element of oil and the dollar denomination of oil, is, maybe, I don't know if it's ever been under true threat, but maybe, know, recently, there's more of a concern about that. So there might be, I don't know, reason to take action in other countries, but very interested to see how this plays out for now. Rates haven't moved because of it. We haven't seen much move in the equity markets. mean, gold and silver are up big again today, but that just seems to happen every
three or four days, not necessarily a reaction to this. So there's probably more upward pressure on rates that are still just disallowing rates to go much lower.
Alex Hebner (:
Right.
Yeah, I would agree. And I think that kind of speaks to how sticky those higher rates are. ⁓ I wouldn't say that this is a flight to safety, flight to bonds type, we just entered a war type scenario because we haven't entered a war. It's been a limited strike. All the US troops are officially out of Venezuela at this point. ⁓ But it does point to you would expect, historically speaking, that it would have had a greater effect on rates than it did. So we'll continue to monitor the situation.
Jim Glennon (:
Mm-hmm.
Alex Hebner (:
For the time being, it seems to continue to be business as usual, but we want to bring it up on the podcast today just because it has been world breaking news. It has the potential to affect rates in quite a dramatic fashion if things were to escalate. ⁓ In addition to it's opened the door to for additional. Interdictions in Latin America. I don't think it's been any secret. In fact, I think Trump is plainly.
Jim Glennon (:
Mm-hmm.
Alex Hebner (:
the leaders of Colombia and Mexico. And I don't think it's any secret that we'd like to see regime change in Cuba as well. ⁓ I mean, that's been U.S. policy for close to 70 years now.
Jim Glennon (:
Right. Yes.
Yeah. I mean, this is, this is not unprecedented, but it's been a very long time since we've openly threatened and then actually pulled off an operation like this where we've deposed a leader of a major world economic power. So I guess we'll see.
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah, it was actually
36 years to the day since we interdicted in Panama, which is the last time we did something in the Latin American sphere. Yeah.
Jim Glennon (:
In Latin America, gotcha. Right.
you know, however many years since since Iraq. Good. What else should we be thinking about here? We got the unemployment report Friday, we should be, you know, focused on that. Any additional, you know, geopolitical moves we might make here in the next couple weeks, I think we'd have to hear something about what our plan is for Venezuela, because we've kind of left that hanging.
Alex Hebner (:
Yeah, definitely. think we've cut the head off the snake, but it's a snake that can wriggle around for a while in regards to, like I said, the bureaucracy is still functioning in that country. They still have a vice president who will assume the presidential role. So we'll see what happens there. But it's no secret we want regime change. ⁓ do think, yeah, keep around the geopolitics. And for the remainder of this week, your standout data point is going to be that unemployment rate.
Jim Glennon (:
All right. All right. Good stuff. Thanks very much, Alex. Good discussion.
Alex Hebner (:
Cool,
thanks, Jim.
Jim Glennon (:
Okay, as promised, let's now transition over to Mike and Brennan with the market advantage segment.
Mike Vough (:
Welcome everybody to the December Market Advantage review. Happy New Year, everyone. what was your biggest, what's the best gift in your house this holiday season from Santa?
Brennan O'Connell (:
That's a great question. I think it's the same for me as it was for my daughter. There's this little like kid projector that throws up books onto the wall. I don't if you've seen this. think, think Santa got it at Costco. my daughter loves it. She's three, which also means that we love it because then she sits there and it gives us at
Maybe two or three of the 30 books we read tour every day gets done by the little Dr. Seuss projector now instead of me. So I think that was the biggest win under the tree. about in the Vogue house?
Mike Vough (:
Same one, we actually had that one last year at our house, so it's very valuable. On the kid front, my two boys are very in the monster trucks right now. So we had lots of monster truck ramps, lots of monster trucks. For myself, I was really happy that Penn State got a football coach, since the last time we chatted, did not, Penn State did not hire Matt Campbell, so I'm still kind of basking in the glow of that.
Brennan O'Connell (:
Okay. Yeah.
Hm
Mike Vough (:
But
enough about us. Let's turn it over to some of the data here. Brent, why don't you kick us off with some of the origination trends that we saw here in December.
Brennan O'Connell (:
Yeah, I'll say sort of like a mild present to the industry was a slight uptick in volume in December, which I think would be relatively unexpected given the typical holiday slowdown. So we were up 2 % in December and on a year over year basis up 30%. So good solid finish to the year 2025, certainly Q4 looking.
:
work to get every loan they can in the door to close out the year. Cash outs were up a more modest, just 1 % on a month over month basis, but still a fairly significant 35 % year over year. Interestingly, purchase market, which we talked about it here, it's sort of been fickle. I think we're kind of like waiting to see where that, like what is going to be that threshold that we hit from a rates perspective.
That is sort of like the escape velocity for the purchase market to really start humming again, the lock in effect to sort of, ⁓ get unlocked for lack of a better term. so we've been fickle, obviously the rate market has improved. And so we've seen the refi market, but purchase market has been tricky. so never really know what to expect December though. I think some pretty good reason for optimism. were, down just 1%. So basically flat.
So it's a nice conclusion to:
The OB 30C, optimal blue 30 year conforming index. That's the benchmark for the CME mortgage rate future. OB 30C by the way, I'll reference it that way. Occasionally it's the Bloomberg ticker for folks that might want to find our indexes on Bloomberg. Finished the month flat at six, about six and an eighth, 6.14. FHA rates dropped just a point. They sit just below six, they're at five nine eight. VA rates fell six bips.
5.71 jumbo rates dropped three BIPs to 6.41. the 10-year treasury finished the month up about 14 basis points. with mortgage rates remaining flat, the increase in the 10-year effectively erased the entire ⁓ spread widening that we saw in November between the 10-year and the OB 30C. So kind of gave back all of that.
Widening that we saw in November and now we sit around 200 basis points in terms of the spread from the 10-year to the primary rate a few other Items here to note conforming production fell relative to all other production types in December. I Don't know that I have a meaningful meaningful story ratios for home buyers ticked slightly higher across all products, but our I think the
that DTI ratios came down in:
o continue to be a story into:
really a good opportunity for originators to go out and pick up volume in this emerging market. How about on the secondary side? What do we see?
Mike Vough (:
Yeah, before I even jumping in the secondary side, I posted something on LinkedIn about trends I'm looking at for next year and non QM obviously was one of them. had to hold myself back and wait for number five of my five trends. about non QM and a friend of the podcast, Dave Savage actually called me out and wanted me to put a prediction out there for where non QM would be next year. I threw it out in that 12 to 13 % range. So we'll see if I'm wrong. probably will be wrong directionally.
somewhere, but I do think that some of the tea leaves have a continued trend upwards there. We saw almost double this year from beginning to end. So if we saw in our 50 % increase, we're somewhere in that 12 % or 13 % range, which I think everybody would be really excited about that if that came true.
jump over to the capital market side of the house. So the first stat that I wanted to call out is our best effort to mandatory spread. saw that generally increase across the board. Now this is what folks in the hedging world kind of look to observe to see how much extra money or capital they can make by hedging and then doing loan sales. So the 30-year from 32 basis points to 34 basis points.
then the government 30 best effort mandatory spread went from 15 to 18 and in the 15 year actually saw a large increase of almost eight basis points from 31 to 39 Basis points now 15 year has a lot less volume than the other ones. So we'll put that one to the side for right but generally it's nice to see those positive increases and on the whole basically flat year over year
I think 30 year was up to basis points and for the conforming and was down a basis point for the 30 year government So it's a pretty flat year over year Moving on to the next one is our is one of my favorites is that the hedge loan stale statistics and the big jump here is that we saw the percentage of loans sold to bulk aggregators basis points from 27 % to 29 %
And this basically came ⁓ away from agency share. So whether it was agency MBS or agency cash window, both of those decreased about 100 basis points ⁓ from November to December, which is interesting. I think what you may have seen is potentially that lenders were trying to manage some type of representative mix or from the agencies. And they may have done that already ⁓ as we got through the course of the year.
and price may took back some more market share there. Another thing that I, you know, they're like kind of prediction I want to throw out there is I think, you know, we see this past year, the share of loans that went from an MBS securitization increased. It went from, you know, let's call it mid thirties to mid forties over the course of the Mostly at the behest of bulk or cash pricing. I can't think we're going to see an increase of cash pricing this year. So it was 24 % of the loan sales in December went to the cash window.
Reading the tea leaves, if there is some type of event with Fannie and Freddie going public or a portion of their shares going public, I think that the cash window is a way that the agencies can use to kind of potentially monitor and increase their profitability. So I could see a world where maybe some of that MBS share goes into the cash window coming in and maybe middle 26. The next stat in our, this one's a more ho-hum, kind of just status quo is our loan sale by price.
month over month not a not a big change here, you know, we saw 79 % of the loans sold in November sold to the highest execution same percentage in December at 79 thing with the second best X. was 11 and 11 and then we saw the third ⁓ Execution so selling to that third best price during your loan sale increase a percent Whereas that fourth or worse decreased about a percent. So so pretty ho-hum there
On the servicing we saw an average to your point, OBMMI, maybe down about a basis point month over month if we look at the average. But in terms of servicing value, typically when rates drop or are flat, you expect servicing to be about the same. We actually saw servicing values increase, about five basis points. So moving from 1.09 1.14, a shade under 1.15.
we saw that multiple on servicing go from like a 435 to almost a 458. So I think what we're seeing there is maybe some investors start to make a play for some extra servicing rights at the end of the Maybe they hit certain thresholds and want to be a little bit more aggressive. in general, I don't think anyone is complaining about that. And the last one that I want to call out, and maybe there's a through line between these two, is the average investors included in a loan sale.
So for the last five months, it's been 11. So that means that when you send out a bid tape for loans to be bid on, you're seeing on average 11 investors respond back. In December, we actually bucked that trend and it went up to 12. So this is interesting. Maybe there's new market players in play are increasing their servicing bids, for example. And this is quite interesting because it's very different than what we saw last year. Around the same time last year,
is here in November or December, we saw it decrease to eight included in the loan sale and then pop back up the next month to about 10 or 11. this month around the holiday season, we saw the inverse of that, which I thought was interesting and wanted to.
with that, that's the rundown here for December's Market Advantage. Appreciate everybody and you'll be hearing from us here shortly.
Brennan O'Connell (:
Happy New Year.
Optimal Blue (:
Okay, let's close this thing out. Thanks so much, Alex, Brennan, Mike. Great insights today. out there, come see us at the Summit, the Optimal Blue Summit in Scottsdale. Coming up here pretty quick next month in February. Check out our website at summit.optimalblue.com to register. And don't forget to drop us a note at podcast at optimalblue.com. We definitely want to hear from you. And that's it for today.
Join us next week for another episode of Optimal Insights, where we'll continue to provide you with the latest market analysis 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 again for tuning into Optimal Insights.