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 »
Active Credit Managers – Long/Short Credit Funds have Leptokurtic Return Distribution
From the paper by Diogo Palhares & Scott Richardson: “Looking Under the Hood of Active Credit Managers” (Financial Analysts Journal, 2020) Credit investors beware: actively managed credit hedge funds may provide more beta than expected and mutual funds too little. This paper investigates just how much traditional risk premia is responsible for active credit manager fund returns. […] 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 »
Debt Capital Markets Review For First Quarter 2016
From Thomson Reuters Global Deals Intelligence GLOBAL DEBT CAPITAL MARKETS ACTIVITY FALLS 8% Overall global debt capital markets activity totalled US$1.6 trillion during the first quarter of 2016, an 8% decline compared to the first quarter of 2015 and the slowest opening period for global debt capital markets activity since 2008. First quarter global […] Read more »
Some Dangerous Signals Appear in Financial Markets
By Stewart Richardson, Chief Investment Officer of RMG Wealth Management We held our quarterly investment meeting last week (please let us know if you would like to receive a copy of the chart pack), and as you would expect, in both preparing for the meeting and in discussion during the meeting, we thrashed out […] 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 »
High Yield Blowout In Europe
By Dealogic/Hedge Fund Insight staff EMEA High Yield (HY) issuance volume has surpassed EMEA leveraged loan volume by $7.0bn in 2015 YTD. This has happened for only the second YTD period on record, the first time being in 1998, when HY new issuance volume ($4.2bn) surpassed leveraged loan volume ($3.0bn) by $1.2bn. EMEA HY […] Read more »
Evidence That Demand Waning For High Yield Bonds
From Leveraged Commentary & Data , S&P Presidio this week postponed its $400 million offering of senior notes backing its purchase by Apollo Global Management from American Securities due to insufficient demand at price talk, according to sources. This is the second postponed deal of the year after Koppers withdrew its $400 million, five-year offering last week. […] Read more »
Hedged High Yield Bonds vs. Bank Loans in a Rising Rate Environment
By Fran Rodilosso, Portfolio Manager with Market Vectors ETFs Both hedged high yield bond and bank loan strategies can help limit risks associated with a rising interest rate environment, according to Fran Rodilosso, fixed income portfolio manager with Market Vectors ETFs. However, hedged high yield bond strategies outperformed bank loan strategies during 2013’srising interest rate […] Read more »