Asset Backed Securities

Last week, members of TwentyFour’s asset-backed securities (ABS) portfolio management team were in Dana Point, California for the Opal Group CLO Summit, an annual event with over 2,000 participants made up of investors, bankers, CLO managers, service providers and lawyers.

With fresh uncertainty surrounding the path for interest rate cuts, we believe the high current income and typically lower volatility offered by European asset-backed securities (ABS) and Collateralised Loan Obligations (CLOs) make them an attractive allocation option for this stage of the cycle.

In this month's Flash Fixed Income, we look at how bond markets are reacting to Donald Trump's victory in the US election. With Trump's stated policies widely regarded as being inflationary, we expect a bigger divergence in the path for interest rate cuts between the US and Europe that might favour higher quality European credit.

In the past 10 days the European asset-backed securities (ABS) market has welcomed five debut issuers across multiple jurisdictions and asset classes, with the most notable being Europe’s first public solar green ABS from Enpal.

Despite higher interest rates and cost of living increases across jurisdictions, there is no sign as yet of any impact on issuance levels in European consumer ABS.

Over the past decade, private credit has grown from a $400bn niche industry into a $1.6tr market that competes with more traditional asset classes for significant investor allocations.

As the third quarter of 2024 comes to a close, TwentyFour Asset Management's Aza Teeuwen reflects on what this has meant for the Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) team. Not only were volumes across European ABS elevated throughout July and August, we also saw €34 billion in primary issuance – a significant increase from previous years.

Douglas Charleston (Partner, Co-Head of ABS) and Pauline Quirin (Portfolio Management), from our Asset-Backed securities team provided a comprehensive understanding of the key aspects and trends within the Significant Risk Transfer (SRT) market.

Ten years ago this month, Mario Draghi gave a speech to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Eurofi Financial Forum making the case for reforming securitisation regulation in order to revive the asset-backed securities (ABS) market in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Recent economic news may have created a sense of uncertainty across Europe, but Ellie Aylen from our Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) team offers a more optimistic view. According to low-level data from the Bank of England (BoE) and the European Central Bank (ECB), the actual performance is much more reassuring than what the headlines might suggest.

Pauline Quirin, Portfolio Management, provides an update on the global Collateralised Loan Obligation (CLO) market, highlighting why we think CLOs are positioned to deliver the strongest performance across fixed income markets for the rest of the year.

The start of the school year ordinarily also marks the end of summer for the primary bond markets as issuance restarts, though this year feels rather different.