PrefBlog

Performance of the HIMI Indices for July was:

Well – how about them fixed-floaters, eh? Or perhaps I should say “BCE Prefs”, since the FixedFloater index was comprised of eight issues in July, seven of which were BCE. It’s amazing what a generous takeover offer can do, eh? Especially since credit concerns had just about reached their peak on June 29 – the FixedFloater index was at 894.4 on June 29; above its low of 878.4 reached on June 11, but not by much!

The “Ratchet” index has been comprised solely of BCE issues throughout the period, but these fell less during the doldrums and hence had less ground to make up when Teachers’ gave the pref market its big boost.

As has been discussed elsewhere, the Claymore ETF returned -0.11% on the month; this number is after all fees and expenses and is after their rebalancing. I do not know what market action, if any, they took in order to reflect the index changes in their portolio … the current portfolio composition reflects at least some changes, but I do not know how completely the portfolio now reflects the index. It is also possible that they took no market action at all and the changes are due entirely to creation and destruction of units, with differing baskets. One can be reasonably sure, however, that changing their portfolio did not give their returns a trading-derived boost.

The same post has been updated with results for the other major passive preferred share fund listed on the TSX, DPS.UN. This fund returned (approximately; they do not report month-end NAVs) +1.38% on the month and -2.64% on the trailing three months. This fund has a higher weighting in the extremely volatile BCE prefs than does CPD.

Malachite Aggressive Preferred Fund, actively managed by my firm, returned +0.55% on the month, +0.22% on the trailing three months. Returns assume reinvestment of dividends and are reported after expenses but before fees. Past performance is not  a guarantee of future performance. You can lose money investing in Malachite Aggressive Preferred Fund or any other fund.

The return of the “BMO Capital Markets 50” in July was +1.33%, but this will not be analyzed in detail due to the proprietary nature of this index. It should suffice to note that this index has a higher weighting in BCE issues than does the S&P/TSX index.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Index Construction / Reporting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.