Long time publisher Doug Le Du is shutting down his various preferred stock and baby bond services. No particular reason was given for shutting them down.
This, of course, will reduce options for folks to research and discover income issues.
At this time Doug is offering his book “Preferred Stock Investing” 5th edition for free in ebook format. It is a basic book–for me not too helpful, but for some newer investors maybe it would be helpful–plus the price is right.
You can go here for a download if desired.
Has anyone tried the Preferred Stock Investing service offered by BNK Invest, Doug Le Du’s successor? While Tim McPartland’s site is fantastic, I would also like access to a canned service that provides specific actionable recommendations on exchange traded bonds and preferreds. That is trustworthy and relaible.
Yes I subscribe to that service. For me the value continues to be the database (what Doug and now BNK refer to as the “Preferred Stock List”). See my 02 oct comment just below for the attributes it tracks. As Tim pointed out, you can find most all of those attributes on III (this site). What I value, though, is the presentation in a tabular format which is updated frequently. It also has useful sorting and filtering functions.
It is not perfectly complete by any means (my experience with III has shown me that), but it is complete enough to have value for me (it currently is tracking 934 issues).
I use it as a complement to III (which continues to astound me for its community and depth).
In my experience, the BNK service does *not* provide specific actionable recommendations. It is just presenting data.
Hi Bur–yes a person needs a couple resources to cover the basis. Maybe with time I will get new databases similar to Doug’s site–just need the time to put it together.
Bur & Tim,
Thanks for the quick response. I am a novice on preferreds and ETDs but this asset class has a significant role in my portfolio. All this takes time and having an independent database to refer to helps. I plan to subscribe to the BNK service.
When you start trying to track all ~ 934 preferreds and keep the information up to the date, you realize it is a full time job. I speak from experience. It probably takes 40+ hours a week to achieve 99% accuracy. You can forget about getting to 100% accurate. The second you get to 100%, something changes and you have NOT updated it.
If you spend all of your time trying to get and maintain perfect data, you probably are shortchanging the time it takes to provide more actionable investment decisions. As an individual, you can choose to do one or the other, or you can do a half baked job of both. If you do not have to sleep all week, you could probably do both.
A good example of getting to 100% accurate data is the list of preferreds that I posted recently which what I thought had suspended payouts. It took many responses to figure out that some of them were paying out. On others, we never got a definitive answer. Or take Grid’s recent scavenger hunt: OCESP. Nobody has figured out if it is currently paying out or not. How many hours would it require to get the 100% correct answer on this one security?
BOTTOM LINE is that you will have to deal with imperfect data, some helpful advice from here (III) and have to make your own decisions in the end. Maybe there is some trustworthy advisor on Seeking Alpha, but I am not aware of them. We do know of several advisors there that have given very poor advice and then denied it.
If somebody buys 1 share of OCESP and waits six months, they’ll find out if it’s paying!
Karma, I get the 1 share buy idea. But now explain to me why someone Oct. 27
of this year paid over $149 for 56 shares. Your probably gonna have to think hard to give a sound cogent investor perspective answer, because I cant come up with one, lol…
Karma, funny you should mention buying 1 share to see if it pays out or not. I have been thinking about it. As of yesterday I am tracking 933 preferreds/babys/terms that have face values of <=$100. I do track $1,000 and $100,000 face issues but we will leave those out of the discussion for now.
If you bought one share each at the last closing price, it is only $20,474. Obviously you might not get filled on every order at the last close price, but that is close enough for us. I would do that in a heartbeat. . . but . . .
This creates a much larger rabbit hole to fall into. How do you track all of the issues to make sure they are paying out? If you do that manually, it will take a lot of time. So you need to automate it something along the lines of "if ABC has NOT paid out a dividend in the last X months, then flag me so I can investigate it." X would have to be set differently for monthly, quarterly and semi-annual players. So you automate it, then a human has to look at all of the flags to make sense of them. . . another rabbit hole.
I am not aware of any off the shelf software that will set up flags like this. So you would have to create custom scripts to do it. That is not all that hard to do and we have talked about doing it.
So I see lots of hours of work with questionable ROI. Probably have a lot of other areas to spend time on for a better ROI. . .
Tex, I have owned a lot of the most obscure issues on OTC and never have had a problem getting paid. Besides most issues clearly show an exD date. So that shows they are paying. Only a very few such as Ocean Spray have no information mentioned.
You make me break out into a cold sweat thinking about having to monitor a 1000 issues, ha!