PrefBlog

The day was enlivened somewhat by reports of excited groupies at the Financial Forum and by the closing quote of BNS.PR.S at 26.00-99.99. Whatever happened to the good old days of bid-without? There is still no indication of what SunLife wants to do with its holding; but surely at some point Sections 711 & 712 of the TSX Company Manual will become applicable:

Sec. 711.

TSX will normally consider the delisting of securities of a listed issuer if, in the opinion of TSX, it appears that the public distribution, price, or trading activity of the securities has been so reduced as to make further dealings in the securities on TSX unwarranted.

Sec. 712.

Specifically, participating securities may be delisted if:

(a) the market value of the listed issuer’s issued securities that are listed on TSX is less than $3,000,000 over any period of 30 consecutive trading days; or
(b) the market value of the listed issuer’s freely-tradable, publicly held securities is less than $2,000,000 over any period of 30 consecutive trading days; or
(c) the number of freely-tradable, publicly held securities is less than 500,000; or
(d) the number of public security holders, each holding a board lot or more, is less than 150.
Non-participating securities will be subject to (b) above as well as Section 711

Still and all, you know, I’m sorely tempted to buy 100 shares at 99.99, just so I can insist on delivery!

PerpetualDiscounts were off a bit today, closing to yield 6.85% dividends, equivalent to 9.59% interest at the standard 1.4x conversion factor. Long corporates are still at about 7.5%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread remains at around the 210bp level achieved on January 9.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 2:17 am and is filed under Market Action. 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.