Deutsche Bank

Euro agencies favoured fives over the last seven days, as KfW smashed its order record and a pair of French agencies brought taps at sizes multiple times their target. With some SSA bankers saying conditions are the best they have ever seen, supply looks likely to keep coming.

While banks fight shy of big-ticket mergers, a select group of private equity firms are leading the restructuring of the industry in Europe, writes David Rothnie.

Harley Davidson made heavy weather of strong US bond market conditions on Thursday after a dovish Fed and a month-long rally in spreads appeared to set the dollar market up for a strong run of issuance in February.

Bpifrance rode a wave of booming market sentiment following a dovish US Federal Reserve meeting on Thursday to sell its joint largest ever single issue, after originally aiming for a minimum size that was just a third of the amount it ended up printing.

Chinese electric car company Nio made a splash in the US convertible bond market this week, raising $650m from its debut issuance and using a call spread feature to engineer a tasty premium. Jonathan Breen reports.

Macau casino operator Studio City Finance has priced a $600m deal to fund a tender offer, winning plaudits for its precise pricing. But while the company could return to the bond market again this year, overall supply from the sector is expected to be subdued.

L-Bank’s first dollar benchmark of the year was in keeping with a trend in the currency so far this year for oversubscribed deals with low concessions, as leads calculated a 1bp new issue premium for the deal.

Miles Millard, formerly head of capital markets and treasury solutions at Deutsche Bank, has re-emerged at executive search firm JD Haspel.

Macau casino operator Studio City Finance raised $600m from a deal that was priced right around fair value, funding a tender offer. There could be more bonds from the company in 2019.

Kommunalbanken took advantage of being the sole SSA issuer in dollars on Tuesday as it was more than twice subscribed and tightened pricing on its first dollar benchmark of the year. Concerns over volatility from this week’s US Federal Open Market Committee meeting and non-farm payrolls kept some other issuers on the sidelines, said SSA bankers — although two are braving Wednesday’s market.

KfW brought yet another record breaking trade to the SSA market in 2019, printing a five year euro benchmark whose order book volume was an all-time high for the issuer.

There was a wall of supply from Chinese property companies at the start of the week. Road King Infrastructure and Yuzhou Properties brought a pair of callable four year bonds, but Jingrui Holdings and Fantasia Holdings Group both stuck to the very short-end of the curve.