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December 8, 2014  1:30 pmThe preferred stocks of energy companies continue to get splattered all over the wall today--all of them.  This is likely an over-reaction, but we shall see in the month ahead.There are 2 energy preferreds that we like (not love--who can love something that has fallen 50%)--and we can't find any real reason to not buy them…

Continuing to look over some of the independent oil and gas companies we are now looking at Miller Energy Resources (ticker:MILL).  MILL has 2 cumulative preferreds outstanding at the current time. (NOTE THAT MILLER WILL RELEASE EARNINGS ON 12/10/2014 SO MOST RECENT DATA WILL BE AVAILABLE THEN--THE DATA BELOW IS BASED ON INFO FROM THE QUARTER ENDING 7/31/2014).MILL's common stock…

We thought yesterdays jobs number would help us discern whether interest rates were ready to head higher or not---and apparently the time has not yet arrived for those spiking rates.With the massive number of jobs created, coupled with a reasonably big jump in personal income, there was not a doubt in our mind that rates would jump. The real question…

Employment numbers for November came in very hot with over 300,000 jobs created--additionally there were sizable upward adjustments in last months numbers.This number has been mostly ignored by the interest rate complex in the last 6 months--sometimes taking small bumps up after announcement and then drifting back down.Key for today (and the year ahead) is do interest rates move up…

Today we have gone ahead and sold another perpetual preferred.  We unloaded Glimcher Realty 7.5% cumulative preferred (GRT-H).  The reason we sold this issue is because it is trading at $26.25 and yielding just 7.14%.  As we move through the process of lowering perpetual preferreds as a percentage of the model we are not being scientific--just selling those with current…