North America

US biotech firm MaxCyte started trading on London’s junior stock exchange on Tuesday, after raising £10m from its initial public offering.

Western Digital, the US maker of computer hard drives, has widened pricing on its $9.5bn loan package to entice reluctant lenders. The loan will back Western Digital’s $17bn acquisition of SanDisk.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association has warned that European supervisory authorities’ decision not to give ground on one day margin collection in their rules for uncleared derivatives will pose big challenges and costs for the buyside, while the deadline to comply in general with the regulation has become a ‘sprint’.

UBS has joined a growing list of European banks ramping up their senior holding company level issuance in 2016, printing a large three tranche deal in dollars as demand for the product surges.

Critics have lined up to savage a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would change the way that mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and other investment companies measure risk and limit their use of derivatives in ways that could have sweeping effects across the investment management industry.

The US regulatory framework offers little insight into the riskiness of hedge fund option portfolios, claimed treasury researchers this week, even as the industry reels from its worst year since 2009.

Banks continued to take advantage of the rally in high grade credit as Citigroup and Svenska Handelsbanken printed benchmark trades ahead of the Easter holiday.

Tata Steel is expected to offer banks a much higher return for a refinancing related to its Canadian operations than it paid for its recently concluded $1.5bn facility, according to sources.

A key area of derivatives focus in the planned merger between data firms Markit and IHS will be opening up Markit's credit default swap analysis to IHS corporate clients, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

Credit derivative indices rolled into new series on Tuesday, with traders reporting a big long bias in the outgoing US and European investment grade indices among buyside participants that caused the new series to trade tighter than the level implied by fair value.

Investors continued to pour money into the US corporate bond market this week as March's rally in high grade bonds turned the market positive for the year.

Evofem Holdings, a company backed by Invesco and Woodford Investment Management that is developing woman-controlled, hormone-free contraceptives, has abandoned an attempt to raise up to $200m of new money for the company by floating on Aim.