Bank of America

Whether Vodafone’s £3.44bn issue of two and three year mandatorily convertible bonds on Tuesday this week ends up being judged a corporate finance success for the company may take time to discover. But it is already clear it was a great hit with investors — much more so than the first time Vodafone issued the structure in 2016.

The root of arbitrage is the same thing being priced differently in two markets. As markets have got bigger and more sophisticated, arbitrage has become harder to find.

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Shares in Funding Circle Holdings, the UK peer-to-peer lending platform, closed up on Thursday despite the company reporting a widening loss in 2018 because of the costs of its £440m IPO on the London Stock Exchange in September.

Pearson, the UK educational publisher, has signed a $1.2bn bank facility with a novel margin link to the company’s progress in educational reach, but loans bankers say that this increasingly popular form of funding is unlikely to drag the market out of its low volume melancholy.

A US pension fund has filed a class action suit against two of the banks suspected by the European Commission of breaching EU competition law in their trading of European government bonds between 2007 and 2012.

Vodafone brought to market on Tuesday its second mandatorily convertible bond that comes with language indicating Vodafone will buy the shares back — a second attempt to achieve the corporate financing holy grail of 100% equity credit without diluting shareholders.

The European Investment Bank and FMS Wertmanagement sold well oversubscribed issues in the sterling SSA market on Tuesday before an expected quieter period for new issues in the currency next week as parliament votes on prime minister Theresa May’s revised Brexit deal.

Bank of America's Asia Pacific head of equity capital markets syndicate Philip Wong resigned on Tuesday morning. He is set to join JP Morgan in the summer.

The European Investment Bank will look to extend the Sonia-linked floating rate note curve on Tuesday with a seven year trade. On-looking bankers welcomed the development but said it would not lead to a rush of issuers heading for that part of the curve.

Cadent Gas has sold £680m-equivalent of US private placements (US PP) across several tranches, in dollars and sterling, according to market participants, in one of the largest PP transactions from a UK utility on record. This is evidence that PP investors are not shying away from UK names, market participants claim, even amid the uncertainty of Brexit.

Koç Holding, Turkey's largest holding company, has mandated three banks for a five or seven year dollar RegS/144A benchmark. An investor has said that given recent Turkey volatility, he would want to see a much larger premium over the Turkey curve for the longer of those two options.