Eagle Bulk Shipping landed on the red side of the ledger amid an unpredictable market, falling short of analysts' estimates.
The Gary Vogel-led owner of supramaxes and ultramaxes posted a $4.56m deficit for the third quarter versus a $2.58m profit for the same period in 2018. Loss per share came in at $0.06, missing analysts' expectations by $0.04.
Revenue gained $5.1m to $74.1m, but that was offset by an $8m upswing in operating costs to $68.3m.
"The Baltic Supramax Index was quite volatile during the quarter, with spot rates rising to multi-year highs before declining by the end of the period," chief executive Gary Vogel said in a statement.
"Given the velocity of the rise in rates and typical lag effect of contracted voyages, we were not able to fully capture the market improvement in our quarterly TCE [time-charter-equivalent] performance, achieving a 13% increase over the prior period."
The index began the third quarter at 792 before rising to 1019 on 24 July, dipping slightly, shooting up to 1351 on 4 September and then ending the quarter at 1248.
Vogel noted, however, that his company's fourth-quarter TCE performance of $13,150 per day with 61% of available days fixed so far has not been this high in more than five years.
That guidance is "slightly below" Arctic Securities analysts' estimate but is still in line with consensus expectations, analyst Jo Ringheim said.
"Furthermore, EGLE notes that the operating performance continues to be impacted by lower commercial utilization related to the scrubber retrofit program, which is now nearing completion," he wrote in a client note.
