PrefBlog

Royal Bank of Canada has announced:

it has closed its domestic public offering of Non-Cumulative, 5-Year Rate Reset Preferred Shares Series BM. Royal Bank of Canada issued 30 million Preferred Shares Series BM at a price of $25 per share to raise gross proceeds of $750 million.

The offering was underwritten by a syndicate led by RBC Capital Markets. The Preferred Shares Series BM will commence trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange today under the ticker symbol RY.PR.R.

The Preferred Shares Series BM were issued under a prospectus supplement dated February 29, 2016 to the bank’s short form base shelf prospectus dated January 21, 2016.

RY.PR.R is a FixedReset, 5.50%+480, announced 2016-2-25. The issue will be tracked by HIMIPref™ and assigned to the FixedReset subindex.

The issue traded 1,482,632 shares today (consolidated exchanges) in a range of 25.15-27 before closing at 25.23-25, 25×70. The TXPL total return index has increased by 830bp since the announcement date, so buyers on new-issue day could have done better elsewhere!

Vital statistics are:

Implied volatility analysis indicates the issue is expensive at its current level:

Click for Big

Interpretation of this chart using the standard assumptions that everything will remain the same forever leads us to believe that the new issue is a little cheap – fair value is $25.48 according to the best fit of the NVCC-compliant issues, compared to an actual bid of 25.23. Note that RY.PR.Q is indicated to be quite expensive: it resets at 453bp (less than RY.PR.R) on 2021-5-24, and is 0.71 rich at its bid of 25.52 (higher than RY.PR.R).

However, the standard assumptions are even more shaky than they usually are. Some will say that the derived value of Implied Volatility, at 24%, is far too high and may be expected to decline in the future. This will cause the theoretical curve to flatten, which implies that the higher-spread issues will outperform the lower spread issues. Some will say, however, that the fundamental assumption of non-directionality in the Black-Scholes theory is wrong; that spreads in general are far too high, will narrow, and therefore the lower-spread issues will outperform the higher-spread issues. Some, like myself, will say that both criticisms are correct but that on balance the lower-spread issues are preferable. If, for instance, you plug in a 250bp spread and 10% Implied Volatility – numbers I would consider more reflective of a normal market – you find that the four lower spread issues increase in price by over 40%, compared to the higher-spread issues, which may well go substantially above the $25 call price, but not 40% worth. Mind you, the critical part of the above analysis is “normal” … i.e., with five year Canadas yielding more than inflation and that’s just for starters! There will be some who believe that current conditions represent the new normal; these players will probably prefer the higher-spread issues.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2016 at 3:24 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.