Well the dove morphed into a hawk today and equity investors didn’t care for that transformation. While I thought the Fed should have started tapering a year ago I am not a fan of Powell changing his tone – a faster taper – not sure that will happen – so much can happen week to week and month to month – why ponder a change when the original taper only started in November. We’ll see what happens. I hear the talking heads giving all sorts of opinions on what happens next–mostly I just laugh–who the heck knows what happens next.
In spite of the faster taper hinted at by Powell the 10 year treasury sank by almost 9 basis points to close around 1.44%. Like the moves on Friday and Monday I would think this will once again reverse tomorrow or Thursday and head back into the 1.50’s%.
The average $25/share baby bond and preferred stock fell by 11 cents today reversing yesterdays gains plus a little. The change is simply some price weakness brought on by the common equity tumble.
Today Landlord Investor posted an article titled “Quantifying the risk of bonds with S&P credit ratings’. The article deals with global credits and defaults and while the article was published in 2017 it remains good information. The article can be found here.
Gary mentioned At&T (T) was off today with no news–I see it finished off 4.44% now sporting a current yield of 8.71%–talk about a ‘hated’ stock.
Gary and RetiredBroker noted that KTBA—a 7% structured product debenture from BellSouth originally fell to $27.56 today. This issue traded as high as $31 or so recently. It has a maturity in 2095 with no early redemption feature. Brokers are ‘protecting’ most of us by not allowing opening transactions in this issue—thanks Fido (for nothing).
Landlord Investor published an article on Seeking Alpha on Tellurian (TELL) which recently issued a 8.25% baby bond (TELZ). Here is a link to the article. The article helps to dissect the company–saves time for us that are lazy and we like others to do the work. Thanks LI.
Tex the 2nd mentioned the preferred stock from Willamette Valley Vineyards. He labels this one ‘high up on the strangeness list’. Here is the prospectus. I glanced at it – strange issue.
And of course Gridbird and others always have plenty of chat about the Illiquids of the market on the ‘Illiquid Securities’ page. Being winter time these folks must be bored as they are now playing a game of ‘Stump the Chumps’ to keep busy.