Do you have any preferred stock?

Oldman answered 4 months ago …

Yes. Preferreds' are a great way to get qualified dividends, until interest rates rise on Treasuries. In a (currently)deflationary environment they can yield 5%+ over Treasuries and most have qualified divs. BUT - should interest rates rise, their prices will fall. Never pay a premioum for a preferred. A list can be found at the followining site:

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/1_3024-Preferreds.html

which is 26 pp long and lists AMEX & NYSE Preferreds.

A problem with preferreds is finding info. Each data site has its own arcane way of listing, and Yahoo has almost none. Many preferreds are listed by the common stock's letters, then followed by "PR" and the letter of the series , e.g., "A"...an example is Hilltop Holdings (HTH) Preferred A
which at Fidelity is listed as HTHPRA; but for info on that same site one needs to type
HTH/PA
otherwise..."symbol not found"

Preferreds come in many flavors: covertibles, cumulative, and callable. The convertibles will convert to common shares sometime in the future; the cumulative preferreds will accumulate dividends while the company isn't earning enough to pay...and then, before any regular dividend is resumed, the preferred accumulation will be paid; and callable, means that they can be redeemed at some date for the underlying stock or "list' price (Many callable converts sell at a dsicount, so there may be a capital gain + the semiannual dividend.) The usual list price is $25.00, and many aren't worth more.
Those that are selling for 18-23 and yielding approx. 8% may be worth it if the compny and conversion date are reasonable...but rising interest rates will drive the share price down, while the payments stay level.

The details of each preferred series are buried in the company's annual report, which in ...pdf form is easy to search using the Adobe reader's search function.

Back to the original ?...yes I do hold some preferreds in tax-sheltered accounts. Lat December & January, the ETFs that deal with preferreds, such as PFF, sold off and have come back to 80% of their peak values of last year (before the Oct 2008 dwonturn in the market),,,but PFF wasn't much affected by the Bank and financial downturn in March of this year.

You can research the various preferred ETFs at

http://seekingalpha.com

& at Nuveen's site (which also has preferred closed-end funds in addition to ETF listings)

http://www.etfconnect.com