Market updates

Having started the year with low yields and tight spreads, fixed income markets had the most brutal month I can recall in March and have been repriced in the most aggressive manner imaginable. The dust does appear to have settled and a more balanced market without ‘fire sale’ pressure has returned, so we thought it was worth recapping where we are today and sharing some thoughts for the journey ahead.

As a manager that invests across the full spectrum of fixed income, we are constantly monitoring the relative value of the different opportunity sets that we cover. Given the fast moving prices we have witnessed recently, and with different asset classes and ratings moving at different times, this analysis can become increasingly valuable.

In response to the exceptional circumstances brought about by Covid-19, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) at the Bank of England has written to UK banks asking them to ‘consider’ appropriate action regarding the payment, accrual and vesting of variable remuneration (i.e. bonuses) for senior staff, together with any dividend payments or share buyback plans.

In the last two weeks we’ve looked at how CLOs behaved during the global financial crisis, and we’ve stress tested a current CLO with GFC-like defaults to see where individual tranches would start to take a loss in that scenario. Keeping in mind the rule that the third in any trilogy is usually either the best or the worst, let’s hope this third instalment is more Toy Story 3 than Tokyo Drift.

At any other time, record issuance and record outflows in US investment grade would each be worthy of attention. Given the havoc COVID-19 has wreaked in recent weeks, it would be tempting to write off these milestones occurring in parallel last week as merely the latest quirk of an unprecedented period for bond markets, but the reasons behind this apparent sentiment split are worth keeping an eye on.

With central banks and governments pumping huge amounts of funding into their domestic economies, they are obviously very keen that companies act with prudence and look after their surplus cash sparingly, by cutting back on distributions such as dividend payments and any share buyback plans.

After a considerable period of zero activity new issue bond markets have reopened this week with a flurry of deals in the US and now in Europe. As usual it has been frequent high quality borrowers reopening the marketplace, and they have done so with confidence from their syndicate bankers that attractive pricing will result in successful transactions.

Clearly this shock/stress test is a severe scenario, but given the uncertainties that COVID-19 has thrown our way, as debt investors we would rather be overly conservative.

Yesterday we blogged on how European HY had always led recoveries in UK equities this century, and that even more so this time around we expect the same to happen.

Some of the panic selling has also abated as investors are gradually building their cash piles to desirable levels. However, we are still a long way away from normal bond markets.

In the case of Aareal Bank the management decision is understandable in our view; should the market panic and begin to offer extended AT1 bonds at a heavy discount, then investors could see this as a real opportunity over the medium term.

In the last two weeks we have seen savage falls in risk assets, but with the unprecedented stimulus and support action taken by policymakers globally, many investors’ minds have inevitably turned to when risk assets might be a buy again. More specifically, given equities are higher beta assets in multi-asset portfolios, when should asset allocators be buying equities again?