By Simon Kerr, Publisher of Hedge Fund Insight Bfinance the investment consultant* has recently published its Market Trends Quarterly. In the manager search trends the latest quarter has seen a continuation of strong appetite for private markets strategies, even though recent declines in public markets have left investors with heightened exposures to illiquid assets. Indeed, […] Read more »
Euro Leveraged Loans Growing Especially Via SMAs
By Alastair Sewell, Manuel Arrive, and Brian Knudsen of Fitch Ratings Summary Strong Growth, Low Base: Fitch Ratings estimates that open-ended Europe-domiciled loan funds have had strong average annual growth of 50%-60% over the last five years. However, this comes from a low base: Fitch estimates total assets of just EUR40bn across all European open-ended funds at end-June 2016, with […] Read more »
Default Rates Rising in US Leveraged Loans & High Yield
From Fitch Ratings, with additional content from Hedge Fund Insight staff A total of $2 billion of loan defaults in November led by Millennium Health LLC pushes the trailing 12-month (TTM) default rate to 1.7% from 1.5% at the end of October, according to Fitch Ratings. Millennium’s $1.8 billion Chapter 11 filing on Nov. […] Read more »
CLOs: The Comeback Kings
By Torben Ronberg, Head of Sub-Investment Grade at ECM Asset Management “Comeback” is the right way to describe the CLO market this year (Collateralised Loan Obligations – securitised portfolios of predominantly senior secured leveraged loans). Led by the US CLO market, we have seen global issuance YTD in 2014 of a staggering $101.5bn*. 88.5% […] Read more »
Hedge Funds to Step Up In LBO Market in Europe
Just like the private equity business, Leveraged Buy Out (LBO) activity is usually subject to a cycle related to that of the stock market with a lag. On top of that in Europe there used to be laid a secular growth in LBO volume, and a long-term trend towards a wider variety of buy-out financing […] Read more »
Hedge Funds Positioning to Benefit from Euro Banks Spitting out Assets
“The Economist” (19th November 2011 edition) has just written about the market for assets being spat out of European banks. The article is reproduced below. For my part I see the market for leveraged loans in Europe becoming very attractive to buyers who know how to be selective, with, unlike the bank asset story, an […] Read more »