NLY, Annaly Capital Management Inc.

The bank's north star, what it earns on shareholders' capital. Cost of equity is roughly 10%, so a return durably above that builds value and below it destroys it. One year is noisy; the durability across a full credit cycle is what counts.

The cleaner return, stripping out the goodwill paid for past acquisitions. This is the number a buyer of the whole bank actually earns on the hard capital.

Noninterest expense or revenue missing.

A plain-English leverage read: how much of the balance sheet is the owners' own money. This is a rough proxy; the regulatory figure is the CET1 ratio, which is risk-weighted and reported in the filing. The point is the same, how much loss the bank can absorb before depositors are at risk.

A mortgage REIT finances a pool of mortgages with borrowed money — mostly short-term repo, which sits in liabilities rather than as tagged debt — so its true leverage is the whole balance sheet against the owners' equity, not just labeled debt. That leverage magnifies both the spread it earns and the loss when rates or credit move against it; read it beside the book value, the question being whether the spread compensated for the leverage through a cycle.

What the bank set aside this year against loans going bad, as a share of its lending income. This swings hard with the cycle, low in good years and spiking in recessions, so read it across the record, not in one year. Disciplined underwriting shows up as low, stable provisions through a downturn.