Reader Comments, Suggestions and Error Corrections

As always we get lots of correspondence from our readers–and seldom do we have time to go through them carefully, which is unfortunately as they typically contain some good information.

Below we recap some of the comments, suggestions and error corrections that have come in lately.

Randy dropped us a note on some REITs that we didn’t have on our Master List – some of which we have now added and some others we are looking at to see if they should be on the list. Some of the optional ones have little trading volume etc.

A number of readers sent notes about our little ‘rant’ on the use of ‘preferred stock’ interchangably with ‘Baby Bonds’ or ‘Exchange Traded Debt’.  Of course there are others bothered by the use of the word ‘dividend’ when in some cases they are ‘distributions’. Obviously everyone has their pet peeves–we sure do.

Will asked about MVC Capital and the information we mentioned a week or so ago just before selling a debt issue of MVC Capital. Here is a link to the SEC Edgar database with all of MVC’s filings in regards to them not filing their 10-Q’s on time. We don’t always watch our holdings as well as we should and when digging around for why MVC debt was so weak compared to other shorter duration notes we dug through the SEC filings.

Mark asked our opinion on Emerge Energy Services (ticker:EMES).  These MLP units now trade around $15–down from a 52 week high of $133–wow.  One of their businesses is frack sand–among other oil field services. I took a quick look at last quarters earnings announcement and it is surprising how well they have performed (not the stock of course). They have a current yield of 17% and my guess is that it will drop from here, but even if it fell 50% from here it would still yield 8.5%. Our guess is shares will fall further, but if we were younger we might consider starting to scale in here–maybe a 100 shares here and see what happens. No doubt shares will trade with the price of oil and there is likely some more pain to be endured in the oil patch.

Gary points out a error in the new 2015 Portfolio (with ZIP) with the JMPB dividend–he is correct – it was wrong.  We have corrected it.

Howard mentioned some convertible preferred articles on Seeking Alpha thinking we might like some of those issues.  Thanks Howard–we will see if we can find a few minutes to check them out–and yes of course we love shorter durations.

Mike asked if we are also an investment company–nope we just do this because we are slightly crazed–really. This has been my hobby for almost 10 years now.

We thank those above for the notes.  We hope to get to some more of these this coming weekend as it really helps to catch errors that we overlook time and time again.