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Finance company General Finance Corporation (NASDAQ:GFN) is a relatively small, but profitable company that provides temporary (modular, portable containers and liquid tanks) storage - unfortunately much tied to the energy sector.  The company owns a subsidiary in Australia named Royal Wolf that is 90% owned and in the same business.  Royal Wolf recently reported earnings and revenue from leasing storage…

A crazy stock market week in which stocks took off like crazy based on a few earnings reports--starting with McDonalds beating estimates and then continuing with Microsoft, Google (or is that Alphabet) and Amazon.  Of course we hold only a limited number of common stocks so we didn't get the benefit of the strong market and in fact part of…

I guess Zions Bancorpation doesn't want future uncertainty in their preferred shares as they have made a tender for 3 different series of fixed to floating preferred shares.  2 of these issues are $1000/share issues which we do not follow, but 1 issue is a $25/share issue (ZB-G) which is a 6.3% fixed issue which turns into a floating issue…

We have focused almost exclusively on the purchase of short and medium duration securities (debt and term preferreds) in the last year as we expected some level of interest rate increases from the FED. We are now shifting away from this as our primary focus--our economic viewpoint is tilted negatively and more and more we are thinking that Yellen will…

The 2 REIT preferreds that were announced last week will begin trading on the OTC Gray market tomorrow (Tuesday).Bluerock Residential Growth REIT (ticker:BRG) will have their 8.25% preferreds start trading under the ticker of BLPPP. Details of this issue are here. This issue can be 'put' back to the company in 2022 or later. Also the company has to maintain a…