PrefBlog

Nothing happened today.

It was another positive day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts winning 17bp, FixedResets gaining 10bp and DeemedRetractibles up 13bp. Volatility was merely average, but the Performance Highlights table is comprised entirely of winners, all but one of them a FixedReset. Volume was average, but the highlights were uniformly FixedResets.

And that’s it for another month!

Good old regulators! Keeping the world safe for you, me and, of course, themselves:

Forget hiring a top hedge fund to manage your portfolio. Your better bet might be an employee at the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a new report suggesting that regulators are trading on inside information relating to investigations and upcoming enforcement actions.

In the report titled “The Stock Picking Skills of SEC Employees,” researchers found that SEC employees’ stock purchases look like your average person’s. But when these employees sell their stocks, they appear to systematically beat the market by making sales within weeks of costly enforcement actions by the agency.

“These results suggest that SEC employees potentially trade profitably under the new rules, and that at least some of their profits potentially stem from trading ahead of costly SEC sanctions and on privileged non-public information,” write Shivaram Rajgopal, a professor of accounting at Emory University, and Roger M. White, a doctoral student in accounting at Georgia State University. “In short, it appears that SEC employees continue to take advantage of non-public information to trade profitably in stocks under their regulatory purview.”

But fear not, regulatory weenies! There’s another benchmark fixing scandal shock horror!

The London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewelers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say.

Unusual trading patterns around 3 p.m. in London, when the so-called afternoon fix is set on a private conference call between five of the biggest gold dealers, are a sign of collusive behavior and should be investigated, New York University’s Stern School of Business Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz and Albert Metz, a managing director at Moody’s Investors Service, wrote in a draft research paper.
…
The paper is the first to raise the possibility that the five banks overseeing the century-old rate — Barclays Plc (BARC), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) and Societe Generale SA (GLE) — may have been actively working together to manipulate the benchmark. It also adds to pressure on the firms to overhaul the way the rate is calculated. Authorities around the world, already investigating the manipulation of benchmarks from interest rates to foreign exchange, are examining the $20 trillion gold market for signs of wrongdoing.

I really have no comprehension regarding the fuss. If I don’t like a price, I don’t trade – although that, of course, is an incredibly sophisticated trading strategy. If I’ve used it for valuation purposes, then any difference between the benchmark and the “true” price is just a timing difference. Who cares?

Yellen is taking a steady as she goes view on tapering:

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said the central bank is likely to keep trimming asset purchases, even as policy makers monitor data to determine if recent weakness in the economy is temporary.

“Unseasonably cold weather has played some role,” she said in response to a question today from the Senate Banking Committee. “What we need to do, and will be doing in the weeks ahead, is to try to get a firmer handle on exactly how much of that set of soft data can be explained by weather and what portion, if any, is due to softer outlook.”
…
Yellen repeated the Fed’s statements that the central bank intends to reduce asset purchases at a “measured” pace, and she said in response to a separate question that the bond-buying program is likely to end in the fall. At the same time, “if there’s a significant change in the outlook, certainly we would be open to reconsidering,” she said.

It was another positive day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 7bp, FixedResets gaining 4bp amd DeemedRetractibles winning 18bp. Volatility was muted. Volume was on the high side of average, with some nice tickets written for a few issues.

Nothing happened today, either.

It was another good day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts gaining 16bp, FixedResets up 17bp and DeemedRetractibles winning 19bp. The Performance Highlights table was longer than usual, all winners, with one lonely DeemedRetractible listed among the dominating FixedResets. Volume was heavy.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.59%, equivalent to 7.27% interest at the standard 1.3x equivalency factor. Long corporates now yield about 4.55%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread is now about 270bp, unchanged from the February 19 report.

Nothing happened today.

It was a strong day for the Canadian preferred share market, probably a result of all the RY.PR.N, RY.PR.P & RY.PR.R redemption money appearing in brokerage accounts and being spent. PerpetualDiscounts were up 17bp, FixedResets won 21bp and DeemedRetractibles gained 10bp. There are not a lot of performance highlights, but they’re uniformly positive. Volume was high and all the volume highlights were FixedResets.

Nothing happened today.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts off 10bp, FixedResets gaining 7bp and DeemedRetractibles up 8bp. Volatility was low. Volume was average.