Rolled six months of mREIT dividends into a second position and the compounding is finally visible

The EARN spread holding is the part worth watching most carefully. Smaller book means one bad hedge quarter can compress that advantage fast, and you won't see it coming until the coverage ratio is already moving.

AGNC around $9.60 was a reasonable reinvestment entry given where agency spreads were sitting last fall, those September and October lots should look decent relative to where book value has tracked since.

Summer is probably the right time to sit on it, rate vol has been eating into mREIT book values enough that adding new capital into either name before seeing Q2 coverage feels like rushing it.

The lower-cost lots from September are doing more work than people give them credit for. My one caution with EARN is that the book is thin enough that one ugly quarter on coverage can erase a spread advantage pretty fast, which is what kept me on the sidelines with the smaller names for a while.

Taking cash out of an mREIT monthly is basically paying yourself to ignore book value erosion. AGNC has lost something like 35% of NAV over five years so the "discipline" of taking dividends in cash was masking a slow bleed, and the reinvestment math only works if the underlying book is holding. Probably worth pulling AGNC's book value per share quarter by quarter before August rather than waiting on coverage ratios alone.

The $340 out in cash thing is something I did with NLY for almost a year before I stopped, and looking back it just delayed the position doing anything meaningful. Your August comparison is the right move, one quarter of coverage data side by side tells you more than six months of watching the price drift.

The coverage ratio comparison you are planning for August is the right call but I would push the question back one step. What does EARN's hedging book look like relative to its swap duration, because the spread you caught in Q4 was real but that name has historically let its hedge ratio drift in ways that compress NII faster than the headline yield implies. I held a small EARN position for about fourteen months ending mid-2023 and the income was fine until one quarter where the coverage dropped to something like 87% and they held the dividend flat anyway, which is the kind of thing that looks fine on a statement until it suddenly is not.

The thing I would actually want to see before August is whether EARN's book value per share is stable or quietly eroding, because a 40-basis-point spread advantage means nothing if you are buying more shares of something that is worth less every quarter. My original AGNC cost basis is in a similar range to yours and the reinvestment math you are describing tracks, but I have watched book value at the smaller agency names compress in ways that offset the yield pickup entirely over a twelve-to-eighteen month window. Before sitting on both positions flat through summer I would want at least one clean look at EARN's Q1 book value reported against where you entered at $8.21.