Fidelity Investments/ Parity with Government's Preferred Stock

A momentous event occurred on Saturday. I shaved my mustache that I grew in the final weeks of my senior year in high school in 1969, an act of defiance back then for the sake of being defiant. Though, when a girl said she liked it, I decided to keep it, since I was then both defiant and cool. It probably helped in the defiant department, as to avoiding some kind of discipline back then, that I was attending what would be considered a liberal private school-for the south. But, still, I was the first to bend the rules. The grey hair did not look so cool at 58, some 41 years later, so the profile picture-if taken today, would be without the mustache.

Virtually everyone who reads this blog will find my discussion from yesterday about the priority of the Bank of America equity preferred stock to be boring. I would agree that it is boring. Bank of America's Agreement with U.S.-Parity of Government's Preferred With Publicly Traded Preferred Shares The parity of the government's preferred shares in BAC and the publicly traded equity preferred shares is simply viewed as important by me, though only one factor among many in the decision making process to buy a BAC preferred issue. The point of the analysis is simply to show that I sit at the same parity level as the government when buying BMLPRH. This gives me a measure of comfort in buying what I consider to be a disfavored security, a non-cumulative perpetual equity preferred security.

I also discussed last night the strictures that Fidelity Investments places on the mere submission of an order to sell bonds. It has to be within a certain percentage of the bid price just for Fidelity to allow the order to be submitted. Fidelity Brokerage & Online Bond Trading This has made online bond trading impossible for me, and I do not care to talk to a broker. It is not just the percentage limitation. It is the failure to follow even that restriction. The bond that I tried to sell last week was trading at between 71 to 75 last Friday, and I could not enter an order to sell what I owned anywhere in that range. In fact, after about 10 attempts over the past two weeks, I am not even going to try again since it is far too aggravating to even tolerate one more time. This is just about the most outrageous approach that I have encountered from an online broker since I started using Schwab in 1982.