Diary of a Mad Retail Muppet

This post will be devoted to creating a base case for tracking my investment journey. Note that I said investment and not trading. Over the years, I've come to believe that for the average retail investor with no edge (or special powers), trading is just one aspect of creating an investment plan, and lets leave at that. To me, trading is the mechanical act of purchasing or selling an asset consistent with the overall objectives and constraints of my own personal asset allocation model (more on this shortly). And I will say this loud and clear, I give TONS of credit to professional traders who are able to consistently generate alpha negotiating an ever changing market landscape. One of the topics taught in finance is that financial time series have a non constant variance (financial markets are non-stationary). To me, this means that modelling, or extrapolating the future based on the past as seems to often be the case in trading (i.e., expecting patterns to resolve a certain...

Caveat: I am not licensed to provide advice. Any of my thoughts are just thoughts, and may not be actionable. Every single comment should be taken with a grain of salt, and facts checked and corroborated prior to doing anything. I've been thinking about the remaining NVCC non-compliant bank preferreds quite a lot lately. Most of these have been called (in advance of or at previous reset dates), and new NVCC compliant issues have been issued by the big banks in advance of Jan 1, 2022. By my count, I think there are only a handful of these remaining, and most are trading at or near par. Two of the more interesting issues are BMO.PR.Q, and BNS.PR.Z (fixed resets), and their floating counterparts. The specs on these two issues are as follows: BMO.PR.Q, fixed reset, annual dividend of $.45, payable quarterly on each of Feb 25/May 25/Aug 25/Nov 25, spread is 5 YR Gov C Yld + 1.15%, next reset date is Aug 25, 2021. Current dividend yield of $.45 / $22.41 (at today's bid pri...