{"id":2907,"date":"2008-09-09T15:47:12","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T19:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prefblog.com\/?p=2907"},"modified":"2008-09-09T15:47:12","modified_gmt":"2008-09-09T19:47:12","slug":"contest-win-a-prefletter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/?p=2907","title":{"rendered":"Contest: Win a PrefLetter!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a thread in Financial Webring Forum now titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.financialwebring.org\/forum\/viewtopic.php?t=108302\">Practically guaranteed to lose money<\/a> that points out (as of September 8):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As I write, ACO.PR.A (TSX) is bid at 27.00.<\/p>\n<p>Atco can call this issue at 26.00 plus 0.36 in dividends on 2008-12-01. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.prefinfo.com\">PrefInfo<\/a> tells us the redemption schedule is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Redemption      2008-12-01      2009-11-30  26.000000\n<li>Redemption      2009-12-01      2010-11-30  25.500000\n<li>Redemption      2010-12-01   INFINITE DATE  25.000000<\/ul>\n<p>and that the retraction schedule is<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Retraction      2011-12-01   INFINITE DATE  26.040000<\/ul>\n<p>The annual dividend is 1.4375, paid quarterly, with the last ex-date 2008-8-1 <a href=\"http:\/\/cxa.marketwatch.com\/tsx\/en\/market\/quote.aspx?symbol=aco.pr.a\">according to tmxmoney.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So: here&#8217;s the question &#8230; how might a rational investor reason that paying $27.00 for this issue has enough chance of at least a half-way decent return to make it worth while? This investor knows that the yield to worst is negative and that he&#8217;s taking a chance &#8230; why might he buy it anyway?<\/p>\n<p>The answer is buried in one of my articles (click on the green squares down the right-hand margin of this blog). Only casually referred to &#8230; but it is there.<\/p>\n<p>The best answer (or the first one that precisely matches my answer!) in the comments will get a free copy of the PrefLetter that will be published this weekend. Judge&#8217;s decision is final. Everybody&#8217;s eligible, even those poor benighted souls who don&#8217;t live in Ontario, because I&#8217;m not going to charge the winner for it. Contest closes immediately prior to my sending out this month&#8217;s issue, which will probably be sometime Sunday afternoon &#8230; but it could be anytime between 4pm Friday and 9:30am Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a thread in Financial Webring Forum now titled Practically guaranteed to lose money that points out (as of September 8): As I write, ACO.PR.A (TSX) is bid at 27.00. Atco can call this issue &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prefletter","category-reader-initiated-comments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}