The European Securitization Forum is putting together a study featuring issuance data from the European synthetic collateralized debt obligation market. The top-three ratings agencies Fitch Ratings, Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's are supplying data for both private and publicly rated deals to give the synthetic CDO sector more transparency, says Simon Collingridge, director of structured finance ratings at S&P in London.
The idea behind the study is to get an idea of the size of the synthetic market, where many deals are privately placed. Collingridge says there is a general lack of understanding of the overall size of the synthetic CDO market and investors as well as issuers have been requesting such information. "I think the size of the market was understated if you are only talking about publicly rated deals," he says. Collingridge expects the information to be available by the end of May.