BEP.PR.M Settles Firm on Decent Volume

There was no announcement from Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P., but BEP.PR.M closed today.

BEP.PR.M is a FixedReset 5.00%+300M500 ROC announced 2018-01-09. The issue will be tracked by HIMIPref™ but relegated to the Scraps subindex on credit concerns.

The issue traded 437,036 shares today in a range of 24.75-00 before closing at 24.99-00. Vital statistics are:

This issue looks quite expensive to me, but quantifying the degree of richness is difficult. According to Implied Volatility Analysis:

Well, it’s starting to get monotonous, but we see in this chart many of the same features we saw when reviewing the recent BIP new issue as well as last week’s BEP issue, the CM issue and NA issue:

• The curve is very steep, with Implied Volatility equal to 40% (a ridiculously large figure), and
• The extant issues are trading relatively near to, or well above par

The ludicrously high figure of Implied Volatility is something I take to mean that the underlying assumption of the Black-Scholes model, that of no directionality of prices, is not accepted by the market; in turn, I suggest that this reflects a rather touching faith that the existence of a minimum rate guarantee on reset also indicates that the issues will never, ever trade below par. There will be a lot of long faces when this test gets failed in the future! All it will take is a spread-widening, whether market-wide or company-specific.

However, for the long term, I suggest that any change in the slope of the curve will be a flattening, with a very high degree of confidence. This will imply that the higher-spread issues will outperform the lower-spread issues.

Complicating the above analysis is a high probability that the three extant issues will each be called at the first opportunity. I will certainly agree that this is likely to happen, but I balk at ascribing a 100% probability to this outcome. There may still be a few old geezers amongst the Assiduous Readers of this blog who can still (faintly) remember the Great Bear Market of 2014-16, in which quite a few similar assumptions made earlier turned out to be slightly inaccurate.

All told, though, I have no hesitation in slapping a ‘Very Expensive’ label on this issue. According to the analysis illustrated by the above chart, the fair price is 23.36.

Update: Demonstration – to prepare the following chart I have constrained Implied Volatility to 10% (a much more reasonable figure, I think) and done a very, very, rough approximation to the error-minimizing Market Spread.

In this calculation, the calculated fair values for the issues BEP.PR.G / I / K / M, with the difference from the actual market price in brackets, are 27.11 (+1.56), 28.23 (+2.48), 25.29 (+0.20) and 22.53 (-2.46). The values for N(d2) are 72%, 88%, 41% and 7%, respectively.

See the comments for the discussion.

Update #2, 2018-1-23: From January’s PrefLetter, here are charts FR-16, FR-31 and FR-37 … the numbering is consistent with the Fixed Reset Review of October 2016 that is referred to in the comments:

See the comments for discussion.