PrefBlog

A full year ago, DGS.PR.A extended term from 2014-11-30 to 2019-11-28, but did not announce a dividend rate for the coming period – this was fine for preferred shareholders since part of the deal was a retraction at par, exercisable for the original maturity date.

Since then, DGS.PR.A has gotten bigger three times – in October 2013, January 2014 and July 2014 – as, clearly, the sponsor is prepared to put some money into marketing a Split Share Corp as long as it has a decent time to run. I haven’t been recommending it, though, pending notification of the new rate.

Brompton Group announced the new rate on September 23:

Dividend Growth Split Corp. (the “Fund”) announced today that the distribution rate for the Preferred Shares for the 5 year term from December 1, 2014 to November 28, 2019 will be $0.525 per annum (5.25% on the original issue price of $10) payable quarterly. This rate is unchanged from the rate for the previous term. The Preferred Share distribution rate is based on current market rates for preferred shares with similar terms. In addition, the Fund intends to maintain the targeted monthly Class A Share distribution at $0.10 per Class A Share.

The Fund previously announced on October 1, 2013 the extension of the term of the Class A Shares and the Preferred Shares to November 28, 2019 from November 30, 2014. The extension allows shareholders to continue to enjoy the benefit of the Funds’ portfolio of common shares of high quality, large capitalization companies, which have among the highest dividend growth rates of those companies included in the S&P/TSX Composite Index. Currently, the portfolio consists of common shares of the following 20 companies:

Great-West Lifeco Inc.	The Bank of Nova Scotia	AGF Management Limited	Shaw Communications Inc.
Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc.	Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce	IGM Financial Inc.	TELUS Corporation
Manulife Financial Corporation	National Bank of Canada	Power Corporation of Canada	Canadian Utilities Limited
Sun Life Financial Inc.	Royal Bank of Canada	Manitoba Telecom Services	Enbridge Inc.
Bank of Montreal	The Toronto-Dominion Bank	Rogers Communications Inc.	TransCanada Corporation

In connection with the extension, shareholders who do not wish to continue their investment in the Fund, may retract their Preferred Shares or Class A Shares on November 28, 2014 pursuant to a special retraction right and receive a retraction price that is calculated in the same way that such price would be calculated if the Fund were to terminate on November 30, 2014. Notice must be given by November 14, 2014 at 5:00 p.m. (Toronto time) in order to exercise this right.

I received an eMail about this:

I am one of your newsletter subscribers and I purchased DGS.PR.A on your advice last year (thank-you!).

You are probably aware that it is maturing soon with the option to extend for another five years at the same rate (see below). If you had any advice about whether I should bail out or stay in I would be very appreciative.

Also, I have never been in this situation before… do I contact Dividend Growth Split Corp directly or do I contact my stock broker and ask them to inform Dividend Growth Split Corp if I want to retract?

Flattery will get you everywhere! Well, I know nothing of this client’s financial situation or what else he has in his portfolio, but I will say that the reset of 5.25% is very good for holders; if the position made sense for him a year ago, it almost certainly makes sense for him today. Barring unusual portfolio goals and issuer concentration issues, I say hold on to it.

At today’s bid of 10.13, the issue yields 5.05% to maturity 2019-11-28, which is quite good considering that the issue has quite good credit quality, given a NAV of $18.75 as of September 25 to back up each $10 preferred share.

And if you do want to get rid of it, don’t retract! Unless you have very high transaction costs, you’ll get more money selling in the market, given the current bid of $10.13.

DGS.PR.A is tracked by HIMIPref™ but is relegated to the Scraps index on credit concerns; note that these credit concerns relate only to the Probability of Default and completely ignore the prospects for Recovery Given Default – and this latter figure will be quite substantial, particularly when compared with that of Operating Companies, which is expected to be zero.

Assiduous Reader prefQC gently reminds me that DC.PR.D, the FloatingReset recently converted from DC.PR.B has commenced trading – and I forgot all about it!

At any rate, it has started on a strong note, closing at 24.91-15 today vs. DC.PR.B’s 24.56-68, a very nice premium for the exchange. Vital statistics are:

Assiduous Readers might be a little upset that they missed this, particularly since I said:

It is difficult to formulate a recommendation regarding whether holders of DC.PR.B should convert. The two issues resulting after partial conversion will, of course, form a Strong Pair and may be analyzed with the Pairs Equivalency Calculator. Performing an analysis of all current FixedReset/FloatingReset pairs results in the following chart:

Click for Big

This chart was created with the assumed price of the new DC FloatingReset set to 25.22, the same as the price of DC.PR.B. According to this, the DC FloatingReset looks a little bit cheap … but not much. To get to the average Breakeven 3-Month Bill Yield of 1.67%, the price would only need to increase by $0.08, to 25.30.

Mind you, I also said:

Those with a taste for speculation, however, will find the conversion to the FloatingReset attractive, since there’s not much downside and potentially quite a bit of upside.

However, look at the current chart of break-even T-bill yields:

Click for Big

That’s the implied rate for the DC.PR.B / DC.PR.D pair way over on the right, the only member so far of the “Junk” group – I remain very interested regarding whether the implied rates for junk and investment-grade will diverge. They shouldn’t … but you never know!

Anyway, the implied break-even three-month T-bill rate until the next exchange in September 2019 for this pair is 1.95%, just a hair over the 1.88% average for investment-grade and clearly inside the range. The interesting part of this, however, is what has happened to the average break-even rate since my recommendation as of September 2: the investment-grade average has increased from 1.67% to 1.88%. That’s a big move and has resulted in the big gap between the prices of DC.PR.B and DC.PR.D. What has happened, more or less, is that FixedResets have moved down in price, while FloatingResets are largely unchanged.

I will note that, assuming the three-month bill rate increases uniformly over the five years until the next exchange, this is predicting a yield in September 2019 of about 3%. Fancier expectations should be higher, since most pundits expect policy rates to be kept on hold for the next year, maybe two.

DC.PR.D will be tracked by HIMIPref™, but relegated to the Scraps index on credit concerns.