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Trading in CXC.PR.A was halted at 9:40am today on pending news; trading resumed at 10:30am.

The cause for the halt was “pending news” – CI Financial has announced:

At the request of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, on behalf of the Toronto Stock Exchange, CI Financial Income Fund (“CI”) today confirmed that over the past several months, CI has had discussions with a number of parties concerning possible strategic combinations involving CI and its subsidiaries. At the present time, there is no certainty that any transaction will be completed. As per company policy, CI will not comment further on rumours and speculation.

Amazing timing! There’s a story on Bloomberg today about what a lousy time it is to sell asset managers:

Their timing couldn’t be worse as prices for fund companies have fallen to the lowest in six years.
…
The market’s weakness can be measured by the ratio of stock prices to earnings of publicly traded asset managers such as BlackRock Inc. and Legg Mason Inc. A basket of 50 companies worldwide traded at an average of 11 times earnings in the second quarter, meaning investors were willing to pay $11 for each $1 of operating profit. That’s down from 17.7 times in the second quarter of 2003, according to data compiled by the Putnam Lovell unit of New York-based Jefferies Group Inc.

It’s the lowest valuation for the group since 2002, driven by a 17 percent decline in world stock prices since Jan. 1, as tracked by the MSCI World Index. Also dragging prices lower has been a selloff of publicly traded hedge funds, buyout firms and managers based outside of the U.S.

CIX recently announced:

Net income (adjusted for equity-based compensation) for the quarter ended June 30, 2008 was $135.8 million, down 11% from the three-month period ended June 30, 2007. On a per unit basis, adjusted earnings for the quarter were $0.49, down from $0.54 per unit for the three months ended June 30, 2007.

CIX.UN closed today at 22.11, up $1.14. The 52-week high/low is 28.49 / 19.20.

CXC.PR.A had asset coverage of 1.7+:1 as of August 21, according to CI Investments.

CXC.PR.A is not tracked by HIMIPref™

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 6:02 pm 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.