Jobs, jobs, jobs! The American jobs machine has produced a spring spurt to banish the winter weakness. Employers added 280,000 jobs in May, the most in five months, further dispelling fears that a first-quarter slowdown …
Search Results for: performance
June 4, 2015
I have reiterated to the point of boredom (some might say past it) that exchange trading will give you tight spreads, sure, but thin brittle markets. And yet people keep trying: The $7.8 trillion U.S. …
Investor Flows and Fragility in Corporate Bond Funds
Itay Goldstein, Hao Jiang and David T. Ng have released a preliminary paper titled Investor Flows and Fragility in Corporate Bond Funds: Investment in bond mutual funds has grown rapidly in recent years. With it, …
June 3, 2015
SEC Commissioner Daniel M. Gallagher has updated his Crazy Quilt Chart of Regulation: Click for Full Version SEC Chair Mary Jo White touts efforts to open up the market to smaller IPOs … but instead …
June 2, 2015
YiLi Chien of the St. Louis Fed writes a piece titled What Drives Long-Run Economic Growth?: It has been shown, both theoretically and empirically, that technological progress is the main driver of long-run growth. The …
June 1, 2015
Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer reiterated Fed caution: When it comes to describing how the Federal Reserve will exit the zero-rate era, “liftoff” is all wrong, says Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer. The term, dear to …
SLF.PR.G To Reset At 2.275%
Sun Life Financial Inc. has announced: the applicable dividend rates for its Class A Non-Cumulative Rate Reset Preferred Shares Series 8R (the “Series 8R Shares”) and Class A Non-Cumulative Floating Rate Preferred Shares Series 9QR …
Low Spread FixedResets: May 2015
As noted in MAPF Portfolio Composition: May 2015, the fund now has a large allocation to FixedResets, mostly of relatively low spread. Many of these were largely purchased with proceeds of sales of DeemedRetractibles from …
MAPF Portfolio Composition: May, 2015
Turnover declined precipitously in May, to about 7%. There is extreme segmentation in the marketplace, with OSFI’s NVCC rule changes in February 2011 having had the effect of splitting the formerly relatively homogeneous Straight Perpetual …
May 29, 2015
There was some unpleasant Canadian economic news: Canada’s economy shrank between January and March, the first contraction in four years and the largest since the 2009 recession as collapsing energy prices prompted a plunge in …