PrefBlog

Aimia has announced (on February 28):

the applicable dividend rates for its Cumulative Rate Reset Preferred Shares, Series 1 (the “Series 1 Preferred Shares”) and its Cumulative Floating Rate Preferred Shares, Series 2 (the “Series 2 Preferred Shares”), further to the February 25, 2020 notice and announcement that it will not exercise its right to redeem all or any part of the outstanding Series 1 Preferred Shares or Series 2 Preferred Shares and, as a result of which, subject to certain conditions, the holders of the Series 1 Preferred Shares will have the right to convert all or any number of their Series 1 Preferred Shares into Series 2 Preferred Shares and the holders of the Series 2 Preferred Shares will have the right to convert all or any number of their Series 2 Preferred Shares into Series 1 Preferred Shares, in each case on a one-for-one basis.

With respect to any Series 1 Preferred Shares that remain outstanding on or after March 31, 2020, holders of the Series 1 Preferred Shares will be entitled to receive quarterly fixed, cumulative, preferential cash dividends, as and when declared by the company’s Board of Directors, subject to compliance with the provisions of the Canada Business Corporations Act. The dividend rate for the five-year period from and including March 31, 2020 up to but excluding March 31, 2025 will be 4.802%, being 3.75% over the five-year Government of Canada bond yield, as determined in accordance with the rights, privileges, restrictions and conditions attaching to the Series 1 Preferred Shares.

With respect to any Series 2 Preferred Shares that remain outstanding on or after March 31, 2020, holders of the Series 2 Preferred Shares will be entitled to receive quarterly floating rate, cumulative, preferential cash dividends, calculated on the basis of the actual number of days elapsed in such quarterly period divided by 365, as and when declared by the Board of Directors of Aimia, subject to the provisions of the Canada Business Corporations Act. The dividend rate for the floating rate period from and including March 31, 2020 up to but excluding June 30, 2020 will be 5.392%, being 3.75% over the three-month Government of Canada Treasury Bill yield, as determined in accordance with the rights, privileges, restrictions and conditions attaching to the Series 2 Preferred Shares.

The Series 1 Preferred Shares and the Series 2 Preferred Shares are issued in “book entry only” form and must be purchased or transferred through a participant (a “CDS Participant”) in the depository service of CDS Clearing and Depository Services Inc. (“CDS”). All rights of holders of Series 1 Preferred Shares and Series 2 Preferred Shares must be exercised through CDS or the CDS Participant through which the Series 1 Preferred Shares or Series 2 Preferred Shares are held, as the case may be. As such, beneficial owners of Series 1 Preferred Shares or of Series 2 Preferred Shares who wish to exercise their conversion right should communicate as soon as possible with their broker or other nominee to obtain instructions for exercising such right through CDS on or prior to the deadline for exercise, which is 5:00 p.m. (Montreal time) on March 16, 2020 for CDS as sole registered holder of the Series 1 Preferred Shares and the Series 2 Preferred Shares but 1:00 p.m. (Montreal time) on March 16, 2020 for beneficial holders wishing to exercise their conversion right through CDS Participants.

Inquiries should be directed to Aimia’s Registrar and Transfer Agent, AST Trust Company (Canada), at 1-800-387-0825 (toll free in Canada and the United States).

AIM.PR.A is a FixedReset, 4.50%+375, assigned to the Scraps-FixedReset (Discount) subindex. It commenced trading as AER.PR.A with an initial dividend rate of 6.50% on 2010-1-20 after being announced 2010-1-12. AIM.PR.A changed its ticker from AER.PR.A in October, 2011. The first extension was reported on PrefBlog and the reset to 4.50% was announced 2015-3-2. I recommended against conversion. There was a 43% conversion to the FloatingReset, AIM.PR.B in 2015. The 2020 extension was announced 2020-2-25.

AIM.PR.B commenced trading 2015-3-31 as the result of the 43% conversion from AIM.PR.A noted above.

The most logical way to analyze the question of whether or not to convert is through the theory of Preferred Pairs, for which a calculator is available. Briefly, a Strong Pair is defined as a pair of securities that can be interconverted in the future (e.g., AIM.PR.A and the FloatingReset that will exist if enough holders convert). Since they will be interconvertible on this future date, it may be assumed that they will be priced identically on this date (if they aren’t then holders will simply convert en masse to the higher-priced issue). And since they will be priced identically on a given date in the future, any current difference in price must be offset by expectations of an equal and opposite value of dividends to be received in the interim. And since the dividend rate on one element of the pair is both fixed and known, the implied average rate of the other, floating rate, instrument can be determined. Finally, we say, we may compare these average rates and take a view regarding the actual future course of that rate relative to the implied rate, which will provide us with guidance on which element of the pair is likely to outperform the other until the next interconversion date, at which time the process will be repeated.

We can show the break-even rates for each FixedReset / FloatingReset Strong Pair graphically by plotting the implied average 3-month bill rate against the next Exchange Date (which is the date to which the average will be calculated). Inspection of the graph and the overall average break-even rates for extant pairs will provide a guide for estimating the break-even rate for the pair now under consideration assuming, of course, that enough conversions occur so that the pair is in fact created.

The market shows odd differences in its enthusiasm for floating rate product; the implied rates until the next interconversion are generally well below the current 3-month bill rate as the averages for investment-grade and junk issues are at +0.70% and +1.78% (ignoring the outliers AIM.PR.A / AIM.PR.B, and FFH.PR.E / FFH.PR.F, both of which Exchange 2020-3-31; as well as FFH.PR.G / FFH.PR.H), respectively. Whatever might be the result of the next few Bank of Canada overnight rate decisions, I suggest that it is unlikely that the average rate over the next five years will be lower than current – but if you disagree, of course, you may interpret the data any way you like.

The breakeven rate for the junk pairs has been relatively high recently; I confess I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

Since credit quality of each element of the pair is equal to the other element, it should not make any difference whether the pair examined is investment-grade or junk, although we might expect greater variation of implied rates between junk issues on grounds of lower liquidity, and this is just what we see.

If we plug in the current bid price of the AIM.PR.A FixedReset, we may construct the following table showing consistent prices for its soon-may-be-issued FloatingReset counterpart given a variety of Implied Breakeven yields consistent with issues currently trading:

Before I get eviscerated in the comments, please note that I am well aware that AIM.PR.B is trading and is quoted with a bid of 13.70. Who cares? At the moment, the issues are interconvertible effective March 31 and are therefore exactly same thing (except for a minor difference in final dividend) from an investment perspective. We are interested in predicting what might happen after the potential for conversion has passed.

Based on current market conditions, I suggest that the FloatingResets AIM.PR.B that will result from conversion are likely to trade at about the same price as their FixedReset counterparts, AIM.PR.A. Therefore, it seems likely that I will recommend that holders of AIM.PR.A and AIM.PR.B make their own decision based on their own portfolios and financial circumstances, but I will wait until it’s closer to the March 16 notification deadline before making a final pronouncement. I will note that once the conversion period has passed it may be a good trade to swap one issue for the other in the market once both elements of each pair are trading and you can – hopefully – do it with a reasonably good take-out in price, rather than doing it through the company on a 1:1 basis. But that, of course, will depend on the prices at that time and your forecast for the path of policy rates over the next five years. There are no guarantees – my recommendation is based on the assumption that current market conditions with respect to the pairs will continue until the FloatingResets commence trading and that the relative pricing of the two new pairs will reflect these conditions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020 at 1:07 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.