As previously mentioned, preferred stocks are junior to the debt obligations of the company and senior to common equity. Figure 3 shows the priority of various security types in a typical capital structure. In this graph we scaled the order of priority by the average proportion of each security type for financial and non-financial firms in the S&P 500, in order to highlight not only the priority but also the different relative importance of each security type for financial versus non-financial firms. When a firm is liquidated, debt holders are paid first. If debt holders are.
