Multi-Sector Bonds

On Monday my colleagues on TwentyFour’s Multi-Sector Bond desk published a blog on rising default risks in high yield credit. Dummen Orange, Douglas, Boparan, Moby, Galapagos and CMC Ravenna are some of the obvious under-pressure names held in loan funds and CLO portfolios that are trading at a significant discount in the market.

A quick look at the dashboard of 16 fixed income indices I track clearly shows the amount of pain experienced by investors so far this year. Of the 16 indices I follow, which include IG corporates, government bonds and high yield all denominated in sterling, euros and dollars, Bank CoCos, £ and € Sub Insurance, three hard currency corporate EM indices and the G7 govvie index, only two had a positive total return for the year at the end of October.

Fixed income managers never like to start their week reading headlines about potential defaults in the high yield sector, but sadly this has been one of those Mondays.

Typically in August, credit liquidity becomes a bit like my lawn this summer: patchy. Over the past few weeks there have been a few stories of large fund groups seeing significant outflows from the asset class, and even of liquidations, which begs the question: what are they selling?

We have had a lot of discussion, both internally and externally, over the last few days around when might be the time to begin adding more risk to portfolios again.

This significant flattening came about as the Fed signalled its determination to push through policy normalisation, with four hikes now expected for the calendar year 2018, which would take the upper bound of the Fed Funds rate to 2.5% by year-end.

Credit metrics, as measured by the rating agencies, continued to improve throughout the first half of this year, with all corners of the globe having comfortably more upgrades than downgrades.

Last year we wrote about the forthcoming "STS" (Simple, Transparent and Standardised) regulation for securitisation, designed in part to harmonise eligibility and capital charges for ABS across the wider regulatory landscape.

We have often started our portfolio discussions with clients this year with what we don’t like in fixed income. Unfortunately the list for 2018 is relatively long and quite large when measured on a market cap basis.

Fixed income managers always want to have the flexibility to find the best value across their investment sphere and therefore need the capacity to buy bonds in different currencies.

Several times this year we have discussed the benefits of “roll down” in an environment that for fixed income investing is particularly unfriendly. We believe roll down gains will be one of the best ways to protect portfolios in 2018 from the rising rate curves that we have been experiencing so far.

One of the most important considerations for us as bond investors is determining where we are in the economic cycle.