White Paper

Collateralised loan obligations, or CLOs, have become an increasingly popular asset class within global fixed income.

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.

The term ‘fossil fuel financing’ refers to the provision of capital (including loans, investments, and other forms of capital) to companies involved in the exploration, extraction and production of coal, oil and natural gas.

This paper takes a deep dive into the flourishing ESG sector and examines the trends, challenges, and opportunities that have emerged in recent years, with a particular focus on data quality, the expansion of ESG labelled bonds, action from central banks and whether or not the green premium or ‘greenium’ makes sense for issuers.

Since we published our October 2019 whitepaper, ‘ESG and ABS at TwentyFour’, the global ESG market has continued to grow dramatically. We have seen a Green ABS market begin to emerge, improvements in sustainable data and an increasing focus on ESG in the leveraged loan and CLO markets. But what does all this mean for investors?

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

At TwentyFour Asset Management we believe Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors can have an influence on the value of our investments, and we have recently formalised our approach to these risks by integrating an ESG framework throughout the firm’s investment process, across all strategies.

This paper addresses how we think about ESG factors in relation to ABS investments at TwentyFour in more detail, given the unique nature of the asset class, but within the established framework that is in place across all the investment teams.

For fixed income investors, it has been impossible to ignore the proliferation of press coverage about the growth of the triple-B rated corporate bond market, and a coming wave of downgrades for companies rated BBB to high yield, with these ‘fallen angels’ exposing investors to mark-to-market losses at best, and defaults at worst.

This brief paper outlines our approach to absolute return, and why we think a predominantly long-only fund can offer investors the predictability and transparency that they demand through the investment cycle.