The UK’s £6bn ($7.92bn) October 2071, priced on May 15 through Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and NatWest Markets, had an average score across the five deal categories available for voting (pricing, timing, structure/maturity, quality of the investor distribution, performance) of 9.47. That also made it the best deal of the whole year so far.
The deal attracted wide praise when it was priced.
“A huge success and was always going to be,” said one on-looking banker. “There’s a large captive investor base dying for this kind of long Gilt. That said it was a smooth process, I could see that from watching the movement in underlying Gilts into and around the pricing.”
There was also a fair bit of daylight between the second placed deal and the chasing pack. The Inter-American Development Bank’s $4bn April 2021, priced on April 12 by BMO Capital Markets, Citi, Deutsche Bank and Nomura, gained an average score of 8.89.
That deal caught the eye at the time, as it was the issuer’s largest ever bond with a book that, at one point, peaked at more than $7.5bn of demand.
“This was a stunning deal,” said a banker on the trade at the time. “It got off to a fast start and never slowed down. It broke most records on IADB bonds — book size and deal size. It’s particularly impressive in an environment where market participants have been worried at the depth of demand in primary .”
A sovereign and two agencies round out the top five — and it was a close run thing between the three. Portugal’s €3bn April 2034 from April 11 scored 8.60, Bank Nederlandse Gemeenten’s €1.75bn April 2025 from April 9 got 8.57 and Finnvera’s $1bn June 2023 from June 20 was just behind on 8.55.
GlobalCapital collected scores on 35 benchmarks priced in the second quarter. The average deal score in the first quarter was 7.57. For euro benchmarks it was 7.43, and for dollar benchmarks 7.61.
That compared with an overall average score of 7.72 for the 80 benchmarks marked in the first quarter. But the outperformance of dollar bonds over euros was consistent, with dollars beating euros that quarter by 7.81 to 7.59, roughly the same difference as in the second quarter.
