Just shy of three months into 2016, CLO issuance remains stalled, logging less than US$3 billion in new vehicles through the end of February. This represents an 80% drop compared to the same time last year. More notably, only a few days into March, a single CLO has come to market via a US$406.75 million…
How Will Competition Among Fund Managers Affect Future Industry Performance Disparity? Post-recession private equity funds experienced a tightening of IRR spreads across several different vintages, as fund managers of all tiers weathered the economic downturn. 2010 and more recent vintages, however, have seen a widening of the spread…. Subscribe to Read MoreAlready a member? Log
European insurance bonds sink to bottom of the pile European bond yields have fallen to new recent lows as the market takes an increasingly dim view of growth prospects, which has in turn seen insurance bonds come under increased pressure. iBoxx € Insurance the worst performing sub index of the iBoxx € Corporates universe Investment…
Flex activity in the leveraged loan market amped up in February as market volatility continued and lenders tried to push deals through that had been shelved since last year. Thomson Reuters LPC’s Flex Factor, which aggregates price and structural flex activity to gauge investor sentiment, increased to an average score of 3.2… Subscribe to Read
PE’s Other Overhang For several years now, the increase in the inventory of companies backed by private equity in North America and Europe has essentially plateaued. In stark contrast to the steady ramp-up in inventory during the buyout boom era, this trend can be ascribed to a few key drivers, including the healthy exit… Subscribe
Last summer saw investors turn to shorting bond ETFs as the bond market kicked back to into life amid the Greek crisis. Volatility has continued in earnest in 2016 as the Markit iTraxx Europe index, which tracks CDS spreads across investment grade issuers, hit a three year high of 121 bps earlier this month. The…
How much longer will the M&A boom sustain PE exits? The M&A boom has been very kind to private equity sellers. Last year saw PE sellers close over 1,200 sales to strategic buyers, with total value just eclipsing $360 billion. That leaves the past three years at a total of $963 billion in total value…
Despite significant market volatility, PE shops are moving full speed ahead on select mega deals in 2016. While the dataset is still limited, the average purchase price for large corporate buyout deals so far in 2016 has skyrocketed to US$5.8bn, up from just US$1.8bn in 2015 and surpassing the US$5.1bn record set in 2007…. Subscribe
The shrinking of balance sheets has become a common theme in recent years, particularly in the financial sector. Investors are punishing banks that either unwilling or unable to implement a more conservative financial strategy. It is increasingly clear that the same phenomenon is now observed in the commodities sector. Mining firms need to scale back their…
Discounts on first-lien institutional term loans haven’t been this wide since 2011. The average original issue discount (OID) is 98.02 so far this quarter, almost on par with 4Q15’s 97.98 average. Only 13% of first-lien institutional term loans have been done at an OID of 99.5 or narrower this quarter, slightly down from 16% last…