Sweden

There were several large equity block trades on Wednesday night this week, including a rare sale of shares in one of Russia’s biggest steel companies.

Founders of Mr Green, the Nordic online gambling company, picked Carnegie and SEB to sell a block of its shares in an accelerated bookbuild on Wednesday night. The trade was then increased.

In a new sign of how hot Europe's leveraged finance market has become, Verisure, the Swedish security systems company, is seeking to raise €3.5bn of bonds and loans, partly to fund the market's biggest dividend recapitalisation this year.

Swedish property company Akelius Residential Property has sold eight year deals in euros and sterling during the last six months, as well as a four year Swedish krone deal. That concentrated funding activity didn’t affect the success of another euro deal on Tuesday though.

Compagnie de Financement Foncier (CFF) this week issued one of the most oversubscribed French covered bonds in years with demand boosted by the long tenor, small deal size and positive spread. At the same time, SEB found good demand, even though it was issuing the tenth 10 year covered bond since September.

October’s European IPOs are seeing mixed results in trading, with some of the month’s deals slipping after pricing, while others enjoy strong performance.

After several months without any long end dollar benchmark bonds from public sector issuers, two came along at once this week — bolstering confidence that conditions are right for a borrower to print in jumbo size in the tenor for the first time in more than two years.

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Another pair of public sector borrowers tapped the dollar market, hitting two and three years respectively, in contrast to Tuesday’s salvo of long end trades. One of the issuers printed well beyond its initial size expectations.

Nordea announced on Wednesday that it would become a systematic internaliser for FX and interest rate derivatives and cash bonds under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II.

Industrial & Financial Systems (IFS) closed the loan funding for its acquisition of WorkWave without further syndication on Wednesday, evidence the market is still keen on small size offerings amid a raft of large deals.

Stadshypotek took advantage of scant covered bond supply — particularly from Sweden in the 10 year area — to issue a tightly priced €500m deal on Tuesday.