Morgan Stanley

Options market participants have demanded higher premiums to bear exposure to volatility in the British pound after talks in Brussels failed to produce a decisive deal to help UK prime minister David Cameron win the upcoming referendum.

The extraordinary versatility of convertible bonds — but also the market’s unpredictability — were highlighted on Thursday when Vodafone launched an unprecedented £2.88bn bond designed to achieve the near impossible: debt-like funding that counts as equity but is not dilutive to shareholders, writes Jon Hay.

JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, bookrunners of Vodafone’s unprecedented £2.88bn mandatory convertible bond, have just gone out with a message saying the book for the deal is covered. The book will close at 7.45pm London time.

KfW this week printed its widest five year KfW dollar benchmark since 2009 as negative swap spreads took their toll on pricing despite an improving macroeconomic backdrop.

Nordic Investment Bank has printed the second dollar benchmark from an SSA this week, as issuers contend with the effects on pricing of negative swap spreads.

High yield bankers insist that the European market will not be paralysed by some of the banks holding debt they have been unable to sell, even after the failure of last week's €1.55bn financing for LeasePlan.

(updated with more detailed analysis 2.20pm) Vodafone is today issuing an unprecedented £2.88bn mandatory convertible bond, with many innovative features, that combines aspects of two recent trends in the market: the equity-neutral CB and the subordinated, equity-accounted deal.

Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, the Belgian investment holding company, took advantage of Total’s strong market performance on three consecutive days to sell €651m of stock in the French oil and gas company on Tuesday night.

The long wait for a European block trade ended on Tuesday night, as a shareholder in Total sold €651m-worth of stock in the French oil and gas business, sparking hopes of further ECM deals in coming days.

A protracted slump in equity markets has pushed some risk measures in the US and Asia to extremes.

Samsung SDI is in the process of choosing leads to run the sale of its shares in Samsung C&T later this month, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group is set to break new ground in Asia with an inaugural offering of bonds that meet total loss-absorbing capacity (TLAC) requirements.