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Graeme Anderson hosted abreakout session in the ESG tent where he discussed TwentyFour's ESG Integration model, how company behaviour affects our ESG scoring and how our Observatory relative value system has enabled us to build ESG analysis into the investment process the portfolio managers use every day.

European collateralised loan obligations – or CLOs – are bonds issued to fund a specific and diverse pool of corporate loans to firms of different sizes and in different industries all over Europe.

At TwentyFour, ESG - Environmental, Social and Governance - factors, are a critical component in our investment process. This video explains our approach to ESG integration at TwentyFour.

As with many things ESG related, interest in, and issuance of, green bonds is growing rapidly.

On Wednesday 14th September , TwentyFour Asset Management held its annual investor conference online for the first time.

Green bonds have seen dramatic growth both in terms of market size and media coverage in recent years. In 2019 we saw $237bn of issuance, a 62% increase on 2018’s $146bn, from a mixture of sovereigns, financials and corporates; and in its wake has come a proliferation of dedicated green bond funds.

There are still plenty of potential bumps in the road (Brexit, the US election, COVID-19 developments and so on) but the positive technical created by dwindling supply has the potential to push spreads tighter in coming months.

We expect September to be relatively busy with new ABS deals, but there’s a very strong technical developing in favour of ABS and CLOs, which should help performance in the coming months.

There are a number of countries in Europe where the banking sector remains very fragmented, and while a lot of work has been done in Spain with the mergers of multiple ‘cajas’ in the last few years, there is still scope for further consolidation.

If floating vs. fixed is no longer the most pressing question, then investors should be more focused on where they get the best credit spread.

The tweak that we will read so much about with respect to the inflation goal is that the new policy can be viewed as a “flexible form of inflation targeting”, meaning that following periods when inflation has been running below 2pc, appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2pc for some time.

Given most countries are going through the same issues and their fiscal expansions are justified, the relative value has not changed that much.