July 27, 2010

Life has become a little more annoying for ETF investors:

Recently, BlackRock stopped publishing the management expense ratio for its ETFs on the iShares Canada website. Instead, investors are shown the management fee for iShares ETFs.

Management fees are just one component of the costs that investors pay to own ETFs and mutual funds. There are also operating expenses (administrative and legal costs, for example), and taxes.

Bank of Montreal and Claymore Investments publish management fee info on their websites. To find out about MERs, you have to look at their semi-annual management reports on fund performance (download them at sedar.com).

The Bank of Canada has released a working paper by Emanuella Enenajor, Alex Sebastian, and Jonathan Witmer titled An Assessment of the Bank of Canada’s
Term PRA Facility
:

This paper empirically assesses the effectiveness of the Bank of Canada’s term Purchase and Resale Agreement (PRA) facility in reducing short-term bank funding pressures, as measured by the CDOR-OIS spread. It examines the behaviour of this spread around both term PRA announcement dates and term PRA operation dates, using an event-study methodology to control for developments in other money markets (i.e., using the U.S. LIBOR-OIS spread) as well as proxies for Canadian banking sector credit risk. Overall, there is robust evidence that the term PRA announcements reduced bank funding costs at both 1-month and 3-month terms, whereas we find no evidence of an impact from term PRA operations. However, given the small number of term PRA announcements in our sample, caution should be taken in attributing the reduction in the CDOR-OIS spread solely to the term PRA announcements, since other concurrent events (including other announcements by the Bank of Canada) may have also contributed to a compression in the CDOR-OIS spread.

There’s some speculation that the European stress test actually worked:

The gap between European and U.S. benchmark credit-default swap indexes, used to hedge against losses or speculate on creditworthiness, narrowed to 0.7 basis point today, the lowest since June 4, prices from Markit Group Ltd. show. That premium soared to a record 23 basis points on May 7 on concern that budget deficits in southern Europe would infect credit markets worldwide.

Bond investors are turning their attention to the global economic recovery’s sustainability after European banks and regulators provided a better view into balance sheets of the region’s lenders and Spain sold 3.4 billion euros ($4.42 billion) of debt in an auction. Stress test results released July 23, which showed 84 of 91 banks passing, reassured investors by detailing their sovereign debt holdings.

However, this could just as well be relief over the softening of the Basel III proposals which was disussed yesterday:

Banks worldwide applauded changes to proposed capital and liquidity standards that relaxed aspects of the rules and gave lenders as much as eight years to comply.

Lobbying groups in Europe and the U.S. praised the changes announced July 26 by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision as steps in the right direction, while firms including Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG welcomed the softening of rules proposed by the committee in December. European and Japanese bank stocks surged.

The 54-member Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index rose 4.5 percent to 121.14, the biggest gain since European leaders crafted a 750 billion-euro ($973 billion) rescue package on May 10.

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., Japan’s second- largest bank by market value, led banks higher in Tokyo. Sumitomo Mitsui rose 2.8 percent to 2,587 yen, the most in more than two weeks. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., the nation’s largest bank, gained 2.5 percent, while Mizuho Financial Group Inc. climbed 2.2 percent.

U.S. bank stocks hardly budged.

The Canadian preferred share market had another good day on moderate volume, with PerpetualDiscounts up 12 bp and FixedResets gaining 1bp. Hardly any volatility.

HIMIPref™ Preferred Indices
These values reflect the December 2008 revision of the HIMIPref™ Indices

Values are provisional and are finalized monthly
Index Mean
Current
Yield
(at bid)
Median
YTW
Median
Average
Trading
Value
Median
Mod Dur
(YTW)
Issues Day’s Perf. Index Value
Ratchet 2.86 % 2.95 % 23,801 20.14 1 0.0000 % 2,073.2
FixedFloater 0.00 % 0.00 % 0 0.00 0 0.0914 % 3,154.2
Floater 2.51 % 2.13 % 41,136 22.02 4 0.0914 % 2,248.2
OpRet 4.89 % 1.93 % 95,487 0.26 11 -0.0884 % 2,338.9
SplitShare 6.25 % 5.48 % 71,938 0.08 2 0.2377 % 2,218.4
Interest-Bearing 0.00 % 0.00 % 0 0.00 0 -0.0884 % 2,138.7
Perpetual-Premium 5.90 % 5.33 % 106,561 1.80 4 0.1770 % 1,942.4
Perpetual-Discount 5.82 % 5.91 % 183,256 13.98 73 0.1219 % 1,860.8
FixedReset 5.32 % 3.52 % 321,653 3.44 47 0.0087 % 2,223.1
Performance Highlights
Issue Index Change Notes
HSB.PR.D Perpetual-Discount -1.16 % YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Limit Maturity
Maturity Date : 2040-07-27
Maturity Price : 21.30
Evaluated at bid price : 21.30
Bid-YTW : 5.94 %
POW.PR.D Perpetual-Discount 1.47 % YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Limit Maturity
Maturity Date : 2040-07-27
Maturity Price : 21.38
Evaluated at bid price : 21.38
Bid-YTW : 5.90 %
BNS.PR.O Perpetual-Discount 2.64 % YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Limit Maturity
Maturity Date : 2040-07-27
Maturity Price : 24.61
Evaluated at bid price : 24.84
Bid-YTW : 5.66 %
Volume Highlights
Issue Index Shares
Traded
Notes
TD.PR.A FixedReset 123,800 Desjardins bought three blocks from RBC, one of 23,000 and two of 10,000, all at 26.20. Desjardins crossed 50,000, and RBC crossed 25,000, both at the same price.
YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Call
Maturity Date : 2014-03-02
Maturity Price : 25.00
Evaluated at bid price : 26.20
Bid-YTW : 3.52 %
TD.PR.C FixedReset 84,354 RBC crossed blocks of 50,000 and 25,000, both at 26.80.
YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Call
Maturity Date : 2014-03-02
Maturity Price : 25.00
Evaluated at bid price : 26.76
Bid-YTW : 3.47 %
BNS.PR.P FixedReset 44,898 Desjardins bought two blocks from National, 11,000 at 26.19 and 12,200 at 26.20.
YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Call
Maturity Date : 2013-05-25
Maturity Price : 25.00
Evaluated at bid price : 26.17
Bid-YTW : 3.22 %
MFC.PR.D FixedReset 39,334 TD crossed 27,400 at 27.72.
YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Call
Maturity Date : 2014-07-19
Maturity Price : 25.00
Evaluated at bid price : 27.72
Bid-YTW : 3.87 %
BNS.PR.Y FixedReset 35,790 YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Limit Maturity
Maturity Date : 2040-07-27
Maturity Price : 24.57
Evaluated at bid price : 24.62
Bid-YTW : 3.59 %
BNS.PR.N Perpetual-Discount 28,456 YTW SCENARIO
Maturity Type : Limit Maturity
Maturity Date : 2040-07-27
Maturity Price : 23.12
Evaluated at bid price : 23.30
Bid-YTW : 5.66 %
There were 31 other index-included issues trading in excess of 10,000 shares.

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