Athene Holding (ATH) has priced the previously announced fix-rate reset preferred.
As of 8:30 pm (central) the SEC FWP (free writing prospectus) with the pricing terms has not been filed. Below is what we know now.
The initial coupon will be 6.375% which will remain in effect until 2025. After 9/2025 it will trade at a coupon which will be reset every 5 years at the 5 year treasury plus a spread–until the FWP is filed early tomorrow the spread is unknown. We will have the detail before the market opens tomorrow (assuming it is filed).
The issue is non-cumulative, qualified and low investment grade (BBB-).
The company press release can be read here.
I may have an interest in this issue–but can’t know until the spread is announced.
The OTC grey market ticker will be ATHHL. The issue will trade tomorrow.
The permanent ticker will be ATH-C after it has traded on the OTC grey market.
Well their preferreds’ trading have been very good. And seeing this is fixed not fixed to float I anticipate it’s going to trade above A pfds in short order!
I can’t comment on the financial soundness of Athene or the quality of this investment. But I recently found myself, inadvertently, a customer of theirs for a short while, and a worse experience could hardly be imagined. Their internal processes are right out of the 1950s (in the bad sense), filled with confusion, crossed wires, mistake piled on mistake, and so forth. In my case, they made a mistake that cost me over a thousand dollars — and I was only with them a couple of months! — but dealing with them was so difficult that after a while I just accepted it and moved on, knowing the chances of actually fixing it were very low. Annuity companies aren’t known for their precision — or their ethics either, for that matter — but these guys are something else. And they have a recent record of having to pay big fines to regulators. Just FYI.