United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) CEO Mat Ishbia and his brother agreed in December 2022 to buy control of the Phoenix Suns NBA team and Phoenix Mercury WNBA team for $4 billion, a record for a National Basketball Association franchise at the time. Last week, the mortgage company that built that fortune took a rescue package from Oaktree Capital Management, a firm that lends to companies in distress. UWM, the U.S.'s largest mortgage lender, spent three months this spring, losing $603.2 million on a position in interest rate derivatives.
Its second-quarter filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows the hit turned an ordinary quarter into a $451.9-million net loss. The same day, the company suspended its dividend and announced a $2.05-billion capital injection.
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UWM signed a deal on Dec. 17, 2025, to buy Two Harbors Investment Corp. for about $1.3 billion in stock. Two Harbors is a real estate investment trust built around mortgage servicing rights (MSRs) — the contracts that let a company collect your monthly payment and keep a thin slice of it. Servicing rights pay out over time — the longer you keep your loan, the longer the fees keep coming.
So when rates drop and everyone refinances, those loans vanish and the fee stream goes with them. That normally sorts itself out at UWM. A refinancing boom costs the company on the servicing side, but it makes the money back by writing all those new loans.
So it doesn't normally hedge. Buying Two Harbors would have roughly doubled UWM's servicing portfolio, so the company put on a hedge against the book it was about to buy. The 10-year Treasury yield rose instead, and the position moved against UWM.
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