I was thinking about it for a long time, but fortunately never bought before.

 

Why fortunately? Because the prices now are way lower than before.

Again, before the Fed started lifting rates, they were trading mostly above the par ($25).

 

There was an article on Yahoo Finance maybe two weeks ago about preferred bank stocks, and it pushed me back into thinking of diversifying from Energy (where we have probably 99% of our investments).

 

The best performer so far is JP MORGAN PFD SER JJ PFD (trading at JPM.K) where I am up by more than 8% plus one dividend. Again, a buck is a buck, and I don't hear hourly screaming about banks as it goes about oil.

 

I sold WFC.C after just a few days, as I was unexpectedly up by way more than I expected.

 

I split my bank preferred allocation between majors (JPM, Citi, BoA), some smaller ones like Capital One and US Bank, and one smaller one DIME Community Bank.

 

My selection criteria was a call no later than 2026, selling price below $20/share, dividends paid at least 4.5% against a par price of $25 (so it is at least 25% higher against my purchase price), and that the dividends must be qualified for a 15% tax rate (which I found on Quantum).

 

I strongly believe that the Fed is under tremendous pressure to not kill the economy, so their future rate hikes will be smaller and maybe even less frequent. My bet was on that.

 

So far, I am pleasantly surprised by the results.

 

One more trick used was to place very small buy orders below bid levels. They all got executed. 

I have free unlimited trades, so why would I care about the number of trades?

 

And one more time - this is not an advice of any kind. This is how I did it by making my own decisions. It worked so far, but there are no guarantees. 

 

Good luck!