Opinions
Richard Croft
Horizons Active Preferred Share ETF
HPR-T
COMMENT
Oct 15, 2015
Stock price when the opinion was issued
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Preferred shares are a great investment due to the favorable tax treatment. With active management you are getting a great benefit. They will be holding a balance of fixed versus floating holdings. A casual investor can get caught in the various different covenants associated with this class. He thinks this is an excellent way to add preferred exposure to your portfolio.
ZPR-T vs HPR-T? Preferred shares in Canada are subject to resets, so they’re a great thing when interest rates rise. But when rates go down, they get creamed. It’s unlikely that rates will go down anytime soon. ZPR-T is laddered, and very short term and floating rate. Not a bad strategy. A better strategy would be HPR-T, which is actively managed by Fierra a fantastic manager in the fixed income space. The price on HPR-T is kinda in the same category as ZPR-T but you get the advantage of Fierra without paying a lot. Prefers HPR-T to ZPR-T.
For recent years, he's been off and on preferred shares. Preferreds are volatile. When interest rates plunged 2-3 years ago, this asset class got reamed. HPR pays a big dividend, but also offers huge volatility. Also, it lacks the growth of stocks but carries the volatility. He had a terrible experience with this. Look at ZUP-T, which covers US preferreds which are largely fixed-rate, a key difference to Canadian preferreds. Also, US preferreds are less volatile than Canadians.
The pain in the preferred share market was mostly the result of the huge number of Reset Preferreds that came onto the market within the last 5 years, so a lot of these preferreds did not reset their dividend for 5 years, and a lot of them did it this year because it was their 5 year anniversary. When they reset their dividends, they were cut dramatically, because they were based on some value above either a 5-year Government of Canada bond or treasury bill if it was a floating rate, or a 5-year Government bond if it was a reset. In both cases, they came down because interest rates declined. However, preferred shares that have fixed rates, that has stayed the same for a long period of time and are investment quality, they have not done that bad. This one is yielding 5% because they have a collection of quality preferreds and different terms giving you instant diversification.