{"id":9821,"date":"2010-02-23T17:16:46","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T21:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prefblog.com\/?p=9821"},"modified":"2010-02-23T17:16:46","modified_gmt":"2010-02-23T21:16:46","slug":"new-issue-gwo-580-straight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/?p=9821","title":{"rendered":"New Issue: GWO 5.80% Straight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Great-West Lifeco <a href=\"http:\/\/www.greatwestlifeco.com\/web5\/groups\/common\/@public\/documents\/web_content\/s7_009672.pdf\">has announced<\/a> that it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>has today entered into an agreement with a syndicate of underwriters co-led by BMO Capital Markets, RBC Capital Markets and Scotia Capital under which the underwriters have agreed to buy, on a bought deal basis, 6,000,000 Non-Cumulative First Preferred Shares, Series M (the &#8220;Series M Shares&#8221;) from Lifeco for sale to the public at a price of $25.00 per Series M Share, representing aggregate gross proceeds of $150 million.<\/p>\n<p>Lifeco has granted the underwriters an underwriters&#8217; option to purchase an additional 2,000,000 Series M Shares at the same offering price. Should the underwriters&#8217; option be fully exercised, the total gross proceeds of the Series M Shares offering will be $200 million.<\/p>\n<p>The Series M Shares will yield 5.80% per annum, payable quarterly, as and when declared by the Board of Directors of the Company. The Series M Shares will not be redeemable prior to March 31, 2015. On or after March 31, 2015, the Company may, on not less than 30 nor more than 60 days&#8217; notice, redeem the Series M Shares in whole or in part, at the Company&#8217;s option, by the payment in cash of $26.00 per Series M Share if redeemed prior to March 31, 2016, of $25.75 per Series M Share if redeemed on or after March 31, 2016 but prior to March 31, 2017, of $25.50 per Series M Share if redeemed on or after March 31, 2017 but prior to March 31, 2018, of $25.25 per Series M Share if redeemed on or after March 31, 2018 but prior to March 31, 2019 and of $25.00 per Series M Share if redeemed on or after March 31, 2019, in each case together with all declared and unpaid dividends up to but excluding the date fixed for redemption.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The dealers are falling all over themselves in their haste to sell this one! One notification I&#8217;ve seen says it&#8217;s a Reset, while another insists that the issuer is GWL!<\/p>\n<p>More, with comparables, later.<\/p>\n<p><b>Later<\/b>: Comparables are: <\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">\n<table border=\"1\">\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"4\">GWO PerpetualDiscount Comparables<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Ticker<\/td>\n<td>Dividend<\/td>\n<td>Quote<\/td>\n<td>Bid YTW<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>GWO.PR.I<\/td>\n<td>1.125<\/td>\n<td>19.05-14<\/td>\n<td>6.01%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>GWO.PR.H<\/td>\n<td>1.2125<\/td>\n<td>20.55-75<\/td>\n<td>6.01%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>GWO.PR.G<\/td>\n<td>1.30<\/td>\n<td>21.76-84<\/td>\n<td>6.08%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>GWO.PR.L<\/td>\n<td>1.4125<\/td>\n<td>23.93-99<\/td>\n<td>6.00%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><b>GWO.PR.?<\/b><\/td>\n<td><b>1.45<\/b><\/td>\n<td><b>25.00<br \/>Issue<br \/>Price<\/b><\/td>\n<td><b>5.82%<\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>GWO.PR.F<\/td>\n<td>1.475<\/td>\n<td>24.82-89<\/td>\n<td>6.04%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<p>Assiduous Readers of PrefBlog &#038; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.prefletter.com\">PrefLetter<\/a> will note that not only is the yield on the new issue way below comparables, but that there is no allowance at all for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.prefblog.com\/?p=9733\">Implied Volatility of the embedded short call<\/a>. There are two classes of investor who will buy this issue: those desperate to invest a large sum of money with no effort and only one ticket; and morons.<\/p>\n<p>The financial guys in the Power Group are well known for cutting their preferred share issue yields to the bone without worrying over-much as to the post-issue trading price of the shares. I believe &#8211; although this is wholly conjecture &#8211; that they have figured out that a 3% underwriting commission is pretty rich and demand some of that money back by way of lower issue yields when telling the underwriters on what terms they&#8217;ll sell the issue if they ever want to see any Power Group business again.<\/p>\n<p>Remember! The smiley-boys will compete on lunches; they will compete on dinners; they will compete on entertainment; they will compete on number of old school buddies given jobs as relationship managers; they will compete on just about anything but price. The 3% commission is holy!<\/p>\n<p>Even with that in mind, though, this issue is very expensive. If it were to trade at a price of 24.25 (representing the net cost after commission recovery to the bought-deal buyers), it would STILL be yielding less than 6%. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Great-West Lifeco has announced that it: has today entered into an agreement with a syndicate of underwriters co-led by BMO Capital Markets, RBC Capital Markets and Scotia Capital under which the underwriters have agreed to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9821","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=9821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}