PrefBlog

Either nothing happened today, or I was busy. One or the other.

Well, I noticed one thing:

The University of Toronto is the lone Canadian school to crack the top 20 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which many consider higher education’s most influential global rating system.
…
Two other flagship Canadian schools made noteworthy gains, with the University of British Columbia jumping to 22nd place from 30th, and McGill University rising to 28th from 35th.
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McMaster University (65), the University of Alberta (100) and the University of Montreal (104) all improved their standing, while the University of Victoria slipped from 130th to 177th after entering the top 200 for the first time last year.

Queen’s University, which had refused to submit data in past years, chose to participate and placed 173rd. The University of Ottawa was Canada’s other new entrant, at 185th. Dalhousie University and Simon Fraser University both fell out of the top 200 after coming in 193rd and 199th respectively last year.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 13bp, FixedResets winning 28bp, while DeemedRetractibles were down 11bp – the last being heavily influenced by SLF issues which dominated the downside of the Performance Table. Volatility was quite good, but volume continued to be below average.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.53%, equivalent to 7.19% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long Corporates continue to yield about 4.8% (maybe a little under) so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (also called the Seniority Spread) is now about 240bp, a sharp rise from the 215bp recorded on September 30, due entirely to weakness in PerpetualDiscounts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Market Action. 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.