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By Tim McPartland A recent article reported that we owned shares in Spark Energy 8.75% Fixed-to-Floating rate preferred stock (NASDAQ:SPKEP), so let’s walk through the process of this trade and potential follow-up action when a trade goes “bad.” We should note that Spark Energy (NASDAQ:SPKE) is a natural gas and electricity retailer and came about as deregulation occurred in the…

Despite gloomy predictions of its demise due to competition from online retailers, Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) just announced a 32% quarterly dividend boost that yields 2.4% and accompanies a double-digit-percentage one-year asset appreciation. In addition to the robust performance by its dividend and its share price over the past year, Best Buy rewarded its investors with longer-term performance as…

Getty Realty Corporation (NYSE:GTY) offers its shareholders a 5.2% dividend yield and six consecutive years of annual dividend hikes at an average rate that exceeds 30%. The share price declined slightly in late 2017 and continued to slide through the market sell-off in early February 2018. Since that decline, the share price started showing signs of a trend reversal in…

Date Issued  3/15/2018 Shares Sold  1,400,000   Overallotment Shares  210,000 S&P Rating   NR        Moodys Rating   NR Security Ticker Symbol   TSC-P   OTC Temporary Ticker  TSCLL Market Traded ON   NASDAQ Dividend Payment Paid on the 1st of  January, April, July and October beginning on 07/1/2018. Quarterly Dividend   .422   Annual Dividend   1.69 Securities may be redeemed, at the issuers option, as early as 4/1/2023  the call…

By Tim McPartland Three years ago, as we anticipated interest rates moving higher, we slowly shifted most of our investments away from perpetual preferreds into securities with maturity dates. These were primarily term preferreds and baby bonds with maturity dates in 10 years or less. Of course, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we can see that we were early…