Thornburg Mortgage Catches Two Breaks (TMA)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 4, 7:59AM EDT

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Shares of Thornburg Mortgage (NYSE:TMA) are trading up by roughly 5% in pre-market activity. This news could have been mostly expected, but the good news is that there was not a cancellation or delay.

Thornburg announced the completion of a collateralized mortgage debt transaction that was collateralized by $1.44 Billion of its prime hybrid Adjustable Rate Mortgage loans (in the publicly-registered Thornburg Mortgage Securities Trust 2007-4). The company first announced the possibility of this transaction last week on Thursday, August 30, 2007, and it was completed on Friday, August 31, 2007.

This transaction is accounted for as a financing and not as a sale, the proceeds of which were used to reduce the company’s borrowings under its ARM loan warehouse financing lines by approximately $1.37 Billion. This should allow Thornburg to continue with the funding of existing loans in the pipeline and the company noted in the press release that it is positioned to continue increasing the pace of its mortgage loan funding.

The lender also saw its shares upgrades this morning in an analyst call. Thornburg shares were raised to Outperform from Underperform at Friedman Billings Ramsey.

If you have been watching the tape on the comments out of lenders, it appears that much of the ongoing market malaise tied to CDO’s and lending derivatives is seeming to get better and better. If you won’t admit to better, it’s at least a lot "less bad" than when it looked like any and every lending house was at risk of imploding and like no one was ever going to be able to borrow again.

Jon C. Ogg
September 4, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.