United States

The amount of debt at the risky end of the US corporate bond market has tripled since the financial crisis, possibly putting pressure on the high yield market if downgrades start to climb, Fitch Ratings said last Friday.

ABN Amro took advantage of a stable background and quiet market conditions to re-open the Yankee bank market this week, with a $2bn trade that attracted more than $7bn in orders.

Equity strategists at a bulge bracket bank are foreseeing volatility in Bayer’s share price around the time its €4bn mandatorily convertible bond matures next year, particularly because of its legal problems over a Monsanto weedkiller, and are pitching clients a strategy to profit from this, writes Costas Mourselas.

The US corporate bond market slowed to a trickle this week with just a handful of smaller deals as desks thinned out ahead of the Labor Day holiday.

At least $8bn in IPOs from Asian issuers could hit screens in September alone, if everything goes according to plan. But with investor sentiment still on the rocks despite the mid-year lull coming to a close, equity capital markets bankers are hoping for a swift end to what has been a summer of volatility. John Loh reports.

The US S&P 500 index hit a record high on Tuesday, which means that the US equity bull market had, by most standards, equalled the longest in history. Nevertheless primary equity market practitioners seem to retain a sense of gloom that the good times are about to end.

Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group on Wednesday said that it would launch two new interest rate futures referencing the sterling overnight index average (Sonia) on October 1.

The pipeline of Asian IPOs headed for the US is shaping up for September, with the latest crop of issuers all starting to drum up investor interest.

Major cryptocurrency exchanges Bittrex, Gemini, Bitstamp and bitFlyer have launched a working group to establish a self-regulatory organisation (SRO), potentially having large implications for the cryptocurrency spot and derivatives markets.

Tencent Holdings-backed Qutoutiao has filed draft documents for a Nasdaq IPO, with plans to raise up to $300m.

Chinese mobile internet company CooTek is planning a $100m IPO of American Depository Shares (ADS), according to a draft prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.

Electronic trading platform provider Tradeweb is entering the US equity options market with a request-for-quote protocol that aims to capture growing investor taste for the product.