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Investment Q&A

Not investment advice or solicitation to buy/sell securities. Do your own due diligence and/or consult an advisor.

Q: Hello Ryan and Peter:

I hope you are all staying well in these trying times. We had our stock club meeting last month and one of our members was promoting hard for preferred shares because of the dividend. We purchased it for the club and I would like to know what are the advantages over the common share beyond the obvious of:
1. Preferred shares have higher pecking order in case of bankruptcy.
2. Dividend of the common share will get cut first before the preferred share dividend cut.

I see more disadvantages than advantages:
1. Dividend of the common share is similar to the preferred.
2. Very illiquid on the markets. The preferred can only trade 3000-5000 per day while the common share trades in the millions.

The slight difference in the dividend does not appear to be worth the risk of illiquidity. Also the higher pecking order in term of bankruptcy seems pointless when it comes to Canadian banks. Also the point of the common share dividend getting cut is not a big advantage when the big banks have not cut their dividend in over 80 years and National Bank I don’t include as one of the big banks.

Is there something that I am missing here.


Regards,

Brendan
Read Answer Asked by Brendan on June 08, 2020
Q: Hi, US airline stocks had over 75% recovery, from the March lows. Airlines also responded positively to last week's surprise of positive employment numbers. Air Canada had been a favorite of various CDN Portfolio Managers, but the stock fell to its lows in March with the sector. The stock price has seen a nice recovery over past few weeks but is still way below its Pre-COVID levels of $50+. Company now has decent liquidity after recent equity/debt offering. Do you consider it a smart move to start building a position in the company, for long term, at current levels ? If so, should we start with, let's say 1% position and slowly increase to 2-3% ? What are the important factors to watch, over next several months ? Thanks
Read Answer Asked by rajeev on June 08, 2020
Q: I have a personal line of credit for more than 20 years and I am now in the process of securing a business line of credit. So far the big bank that I deal with for my personal life is being a ‘pain in the butt’. The interest rate and other terms are not favourable to my business. The requested loan amount is $100,000 +/- and my collateral is $60,000. Any suggestions from your or others within your 5i family would be appreciate.
Clayton
Read Answer Asked by Clayton on June 08, 2020
Q: I don’t know if this appropriate. But here goes. Today you answered my question. If you have access to my question.it will save me repeating it again. To reduce risk I have sold my position in BPY.UN at a profit. Looking at the portfolio I would appreciate any addition you would make to this portfolio either new or adding to existing position
Read Answer Asked by Roy on June 08, 2020
Q: I am going to trim my KXS back to 6%. With the proceeds I am considering one of the following:
Add to my CAE; add to my GSY; add to my ATD.B or initiate a position in DSG.
How would you rank these choices? Any and all thoughts will be appreciated. ram
Read Answer Asked by Ray on June 08, 2020
Q: Can a company cut the dividend on their preferred shares as easily as they can on their common shares?
Read Answer Asked by Graham on June 05, 2020
Q: Can you shed some light on what is going on with WildBrain the last two days. Never seen that kind of volatility for that stock. Did a round trip yesterday. Went from $1.36 to $2.38 on huge volume and today back to $1.36. Who is buying since there was huge volume at $2.38
And the next day take a $1.00 loss. Again, I
Don’t understand the volatility in the market.
Is it a creeping takeover going on?



$2.38 And back today to $1.36.
Read Answer Asked by Helen on June 05, 2020
Q: Hi 5i
Hope you can help me. I've managed my and my wife's registered and unregistered accounts for a number of years and I'm satisfied with the results. Those accounts primarily hold equities and I spend quite a bit of time overseeing them and tweaking as I think necessary.
I've now been put in the position of acting as trustee of funds for two minors. The time frames the two trusts will run are 7 and 9 years respectively and the principal amount of each is approx 75K. I want to invest the funds but I don't want to put them in individual equities and manage them as actively as I do our personal accounts. I would prefer to put them into ETF's that I can keep an eye on monthly or quarterly and not worry too much about tweaking.
Being optimistic by nature I'm hoping to arrange to get it all for these two trusts - capital appreciation, income, sensible degree of risk, Canadian, US and international exposure, favourable tax treatment, etc.
There are an awful lot of ETF's out there and I really don't know how best to evaluate them to shake out a reasonable number to look into further - especially considering how difficult it can be to identify individual holdings to effectively avoid overlap and provide diversification.
With all that in mind, could I ask you to list 5 (or so) equity based ETF's for each of CDA, the US and internationally that you think might accomplish the goals I've listed, so that I can then look into those ones further and make some decisions about where to put these funds I'm charged with managing.
Also, if you do have any general or specific advice that you think might be useful to me in the situation I've described, I would certainly appreciate your including it in your answer.
Thanks very much and please deduct credits as you feel appropriate.
Peter
Read Answer Asked by Peter on June 05, 2020
Q: I really value your knowledge and experience. I would be very interested in your thoughts on the difference between the value of tech stocks today and those of the "dot com" bubble of the late 1990s. Thanks again.
Read Answer Asked by Danny-boy on June 05, 2020
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