PrefBlog

Quadravest has announced:

Financial 15 Split Corp. (the “Company”) is pleased to announce it will undertake an offering of Preferred Shares and Class A Shares of the Company. The offering will be co-led by National Bank Financial Inc., CIBC Capital Markets, Scotia Capital Inc., and RBC Capital Markets and will also include BMO Capital Markets, GMP Securities L.P., Canaccord Genuity Corp., Industrial Alliance Securities Inc., Raymond James, Echelon Wealth Partners, Mackie Research Capital Corporation, Desjardins Securities Inc., and Manulife Securities Incorporated.

The Preferred Shares will be offered at a price of $9.90 per Preferred Share to yield 5.30% and the Class A Shares will be offered at a price of $10.50 per Class A Share to yield 14.40%.

The closing price on the TSX of each of the Preferred Shares and the Class A Shares on November 6, 2017 was $10.08 and $10.70, respectively.

Since inception of the Company, the aggregate dividends declared on the Preferred Shares have been $7.33 per share and the aggregate dividends paid on the Class A Shares have been $17.14 per share, for a combined total of $24.47. All distributions to date have been made in tax advantage eligible Canadian dividends or capital gains dividends.

The net proceeds of the offering will be used by the Company to invest in an actively managed, high quality portfolio consisting of 15 financial services companies made up of Canadian and U.S. issuers as follows:

Bank of Montreal	National Bank of Canada	Bank of America Corp.
The Bank of Nova Scotia	Manulife Financial Corporation	Citigroup Inc.
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce	Sun Life Financial Services of Canada Inc.	Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Royal Bank of Canada	Great-West Lifeco Inc.	JP Morgan Chase & Co.
The Toronto-Dominion Bank	CI Financial Corp.	Wells Fargo & Co.

The Company’s investment objectives are:
Preferred Shares:
i. to provide holders of the Preferred Shares with fixed, cumulative preferential monthly cash dividends currently in the amount of 5.25% annually, to be set by the Board of Directors annually subject to a minimum of 5.25% until 2020; and
ii. on or about the termination date, currently December 1, 2020 (subject to further 5 year extensions thereafter), to pay the holders of the Preferred Shares $10.00 per Preferred Share.

Class A Shares:
i. to provide holders of the Class A Shares with regular monthly cash dividends in an amount to be determined by the Board of the Directors; and
ii. to permit holders to participate in all growth in the net asset value of the Company above $10 per Unit, by paying holders on or about the termination date of December 1, 2020 (subject to further 5 year extensions thereafter) such amounts as remain in the Company after paying $10 per Preferred Share.

The sales period of this overnight offering will end at 9:00 a.m. EST on November 8, 2017. The offering is expected to close on or about November 15, 2017 and is subject to certain closing conditions including approval by the TSX.

So the Whole Units are being flogged for $20.40, not bad when you consider that the Whole Unit NAVPU was 17.95 as of October 31. It’s a lovely business when it works!

This offering comes hard on the heels of their September, 2017, offering which raised 79.1-million

I am a little surprised that the summary of investment objectives given in press release did not mention the one year dividend boost to 5.50% for the preferreds that was recently announced.

There’s a thread on Financial Webring Forum which has attracted the attention of one big fan who is putting money into these things, although not directly. I admit, I cannot think of a reason for buying the capital units at such a large premium over intrinsic value other than a belief that the distributions will go on forever … in which case an investor would be much better off buying the underlying issues on margin.

Update, 2017-11-8: The offering was quite successful:

Financial 15 Split Corp. (the “Company”) is pleased to announce it has completed the overnight marketing of up to 5,361,000 Preferred Shares and up to 5,361,000 Class A Shares of the Company. The total proceeds of the offering are expected to be approximately $109.4 million.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2017 at 6:50 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.