PrefBlog

TC Energy Corporation has announced:

that it has notified the registered shareholders of the applicable dividend rates for its Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series 1 (Series 1 Shares) and its Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series 2 (Series 2 Shares).

As previously announced in the Company’s news release dated November 21, 2019, holders of the Series 1 Shares have the right on December 31, 2019 to convert, on a one-for-one basis, any or all of their Series 1 Shares into Series 2 Shares and receive a floating rate quarterly dividend, or retain any or all of their Series 1 Shares and receive a new fixed rate quarterly dividend.

Holders of the Series 2 Shares have the right on December 31, 2019 to convert, on a one-for-one basis, any or all of their Series 2 Shares into Series 1 Shares and receive a fixed rate quarterly dividend, or retain any or all of their Series 2 Shares and receive a floating rate quarterly dividend.

Should a holder of Series 1 Shares choose to retain their shares, such shareholders will receive the new annual fixed dividend rate applicable to Series 1 Shares of 3.479% for the five-year period commencing December 31, 2019 to, but excluding, December 31, 2024. Should a holder of Series 1 Shares choose to convert their shares to Series 2 Shares, holders of Series 2 Shares will receive the floating quarterly dividend rate applicable to the Series 2 Shares of 3.572% for the three-month period commencing December 31, 2019 to, but excluding, March 30, 2020. The floating dividend rate will be reset every quarter.

Should a holder of Series 2 Shares choose to retain their shares, such shareholders will receive the floating quarterly dividend rate applicable to Series 2 Shares of 3.572% for the three-month period commencing December 31, 2019 to, but excluding, March 30, 2020. The floating dividend rate will be reset every quarter. Should a holder of Series 2 Shares choose to convert their shares to Series 1 Shares, holders of Series 1 Shares will receive the new fixed quarterly dividend rate applicable to the Series 1 Shares of 3.479% for the five-year period commencing December 31, 2019 to, but excluding, December 31, 2024.

Beneficial owners of Series 1 or Series 2 Shares who do not provide notice or communicate with their broker or other nominee by 5 p.m. (EST) on December 16, 2019 will retain their respective Series 1 Shares or Series 2 Shares, as applicable, and receive the new dividend rate applicable to such shares, subject to the conditions stated above.

The foregoing conversions are subject to the conditions that: (i) if TC Energy determines that there would be less than one million Series 1 Shares outstanding after December 31, 2019, then all remaining Series 1 Shares will automatically be converted into Series 2 Shares on a one-for-one basis on December 31, 2019, and (ii) if TC Energy determines that there would be less than one million Series 2 Shares outstanding after December 31, 2019, then all of the remaining outstanding Series 2 Shares will automatically be converted into Series 1 Shares on a one-for-one basis on December 31, 2019. In either case, TC Energy will issue a news release to that effect no later than December 23, 2019.

Holders of Series 1 Shares and Series 2 Shares will have the opportunity to convert their shares again on December 31, 2024 and every five years thereafter as long as the shares remain outstanding. For more information on the terms of, and risks associated with an investment in the Series 1 Shares and the Series 2 Shares, please see the prospectus supplement dated September 22, 2009 which is available on sedar.com or on our website.

TRP.PR.A commenced trading 2009-9-30 after being announced 2009-9-22. It commenced life as a FixedReset, 4.60%+192, that reset to 3.266% effective 2014-12-31. Assiduous Readers may recall that I have blamed the 2014 reset of TRP.PR.A for what we might now call ‘the first half’ of the current bear market. I recommended conversion to TRP.PR.F in 2014 and there was a conversion rate of about 62%. The company announced the extension to 2024 on 2019-11-21.

The most logical way to analyze the question of whether or not to convert is through the theory of Preferred Pairs, for which a calculator is available. Briefly, a Strong Pair is defined as a pair of securities that can be interconverted in the future (e.g., TRP.PR.A and the FloatingReset that will exist if enough holders convert). Since they will be interconvertible on this future date, it may be assumed that they will be priced identically on this date (if they aren’t then holders will simply convert en masse to the higher-priced issue). And since they will be priced identically on a given date in the future, any current difference in price must be offset by expectations of an equal and opposite value of dividends to be received in the interim. And since the dividend rate on one element of the pair is both fixed and known, the implied average rate of the other, floating rate, instrument can be determined. Finally, we say, we may compare these average rates and take a view regarding the actual future course of that rate relative to the implied rate, which will provide us with guidance on which element of the pair is likely to outperform the other until the next interconversion date, at which time the process will be repeated.

We can show the break-even rates for each FixedReset / FloatingReset Strong Pair graphically by plotting the implied average 3-month bill rate against the next Exchange Date (which is the date to which the average will be calculated). Inspection of the graph and the overall average break-even rates for extant pairs will provide a guide for estimating the break-even rate for the pair now under consideration assuming, of course, that enough conversions occur so that the pair is in fact created.

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The market has little enthusiasm for floating rate product; the implied rates until the next interconversion are generally well below the current 3-month bill rate as the averages for investment-grade and junk issues are at +0.89% and +1.20%, respectively. Whatever might be the result of the next few Bank of Canada overnight rate decisions, I suggest that it is unlikely that the average rate over the next five years will be lower than current – but if you disagree, of course, you may interpret the data any way you like.

Since credit quality of each element of the pair is equal to the other element, it should not make any difference whether the pair examined is investment-grade or junk, although we might expect greater variation of implied rates between junk issues on grounds of lower liquidity, and this is just what we see.

If we plug in the current bid price of the TRP.PR.A FixedReset, we may construct the following table showing consistent prices for its soon-may-be-issued FloatingReset counterpart given a variety of Implied Breakeven yields consistent with issues currently trading:

Before I get eviscerated in the comments, please note that I am well aware that TRP.PR.F is trading and is quoted with a bid of 13.84. Who cares? At the moment, both issues are ex-dividend and are interconvertible effective December 31 and are therefore exactly the same thing from an investment perspective. We are interested in predicting what might happen after the potential for conversion has passed.

Based on current market conditions, I suggest that the FloatingResets TRP.PR.F that will result from conversion are likely to trade below the price of their FixedReset counterparts, TRP.PR.A. Therefore, it seems likely that I will recommend that holders of TRP.PR.A continue to hold the issue and not to convert, while holders of TRP.PR.F should convert to TRP.PR.A, but I will wait until it’s closer to the December 16 notification deadline before making a final pronouncement. I will note that once the conversion period has passed it may be a good trade to swap one issue for the other in the market once both elements of each pair are trading and you can – hopefully – do it with a reasonably good take-out in price, rather than doing it through the company on a 1:1 basis. But that, of course, will depend on the prices at that time and your forecast for the path of policy rates over the next five years. There are no guarantees – my recommendation is based on the assumption that current market conditions with respect to the pairs will continue until the FloatingResets commence trading and that the relative pricing of the two new pairs will reflect these conditions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019 at 12:55 am and is filed under Issue Comments. 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.