Robots Bought Munis Amid Record Sell-Off’s ‘Baptism of Fire’
04/20/2020
Muni quants stepped in to buy when Wall Street pulled back. Secondary market offerings soared as investors fled funds...The cost to trade investment-grade state and local government bonds maturing between 5 and 10 years rose to almost 2.6 percentage point on March 25 as all dealers demanded more compensation for the risk of taking debt onto their balance sheets, according to BondWave, a financial technology company. open website
Several large new issues price in a stabilizing muni market
04/08/2020
The municipal market rallied by as much as 10 basis points, several large new issues priced and ICI reported $1.5 billion of outflows, down dramatically from the previous report of $20 billion...Typically, between 14,000 and 16,000 municipal CUSIPs trade daily, only 1.2% of the outstanding municipal universe but this number doubled in March resulting in many more qualifying trades for the Bondwave AA QCurve, according to Madhura Katre, VP of the Information Lab at Bondwave. open website
Fixed Income Market Reaction to Equity Market Selloff
04/02/2020
With concern about the impact to economic activity of the COVID-19 virus being blamed for the recent steep selloff in equities, we are also seeing an impact on the cost of trading liquid, investment grade corporate bonds. The BondWave Benchmark Data and Trading Indices includes two corporate bond bid-offer spread indices. BondWave Bid-Offer Spread Service (BOSS) measures the width of the bid-offer spread in the dealer-to-dealer market for A and BBB rated corporate bonds as well as the bid-offer spread in the dealer-to-dealer market for AA and A municipal bonds. open website