Preferred Shares - Sold

Several days ago (sorry for the late post, as if anyone actually reads this thing!) I sold my preferred share positions (BCE.PR.A, BNS.PR.M, CL.PR.B, POW.PR.B). The reason is pretty simple: Mr. Market is anticipating more interest rates increases. Since these preferred shares pay a fixed rate of interest, when interest rates go up, the shares prices of fixed-rate preferreds go down.

My idea was that the share prices would recover to historically more normal levels as the economy improved. In the meantime, I would be getting a 5 to 6% yield. That happened for (see figure below) CL.PR.B and for BCE.PR.A, but not for the others. But even CL.PR.B and BCE.PR.A eventually succumbed to the effects of the expectation of increased interest rates.

from bigcharts

In a future post, I'll show my returns on each preferred.