Tag Archives: corporate bond ETF liquidity

bond etf liquidity

Calling for Clarity: Corporate Bond ETF Liquidity

There continues to be a call for clarity with regard to the topic of corporate bond ETF liquidity and where/how corporate bond ETFs add or detract within the context of investors ability to get ‘best execution’ when secondary market trade in underlying corporate bonds is increasingly ‘illiquid.’

This not only a big agenda item for the SEC to wrap their arms around, it is a challenge for “market experts” to frame in a manner that resonates with even the most knowledgeable bond market players.

MarketsMuse curators noticed that ETF market guru Dave Nadig penned a piece for ETF.com last night “How Illiquid are Bond ETFs, Really?” that helps to distill the discussion elements in a manner that even regulators can understand.. Without  further ado, below is the opening extract..

“Transcendent liquidity” is a somewhat silly-sounding phrase coined by the equally silly Matt Hougan, CEO of ETF.com, to discuss the odd situation in fixed-income ETFs—specifically, fixed-income ETFs tracking narrow corners of the market like high-yield bonds.

But it’s increasingly the focus of regulators and skeptical investors like Carl Icahn. Simply put: Flagship funds like the iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG | B-68) trade like water, while their underlying holdings don’t. Is this a real problem, or a unicorn?

Defining Liquidity

The problem with even analyzing this question starts with definitions. When most people talk about ETF liquidity, they’re actually conflating two different things: tradability and fairness.

Tradability is actually a pretty simple concept: How well will the market let me get in or out of an ETF? And for narrow fixed-income ETFs (I’m limiting myself to corporates, in this analysis), most investors should be paying attention to the fairly obvious metrics, e.g., things like median daily dollar volume and time-weighted average spreads. By these metrics, a fund like HYG looks like the easiest thing to trade ever:

On a value basis, the average spread for HYG on a bad day of the past year is under 2 basis points. It’s consistently a penny wide on a handle around $80, with nearly $1 billion changing hands on most days. That puts it among the most liquid securities in the world. And that easy liquidity is precisely what has the SEC—and some investors—concerned.

Fairness

But that’s tradability, not fairness. Fairness is a unique concept to ETF trading. We don’t talk about whether the execution you got in Apple was “fair.” You might get a poor execution, or you might sell on a dip, but there’s no question that your properly settled trade in Apple is “fair.”

In an ETF, however, there is an inherent “fair” price—the net asset value of the ETF at the time you trade it—intraday NAV or iNAV. If the ETF only holds Apple and Microsoft, that fair price is easy to calculate, and is in fact disseminated every 15 seconds by the exchange.

But when the underlying securities are illiquid for some reason (hard to value, time-zone disconnects or just obscure), assessing the “fair” price becomes difficult, if not impossible.

If the securities in the ETF are all listed in Tokyo, then your execution at noon in New York will necessarily not be exactly the NAV of the ETF, because none of those holdings is currently trading.

Premiums & Discounts

In the case of something like corporate bonds, the issue isn’t one of time zone, it’s one of market structure. Corporate bonds are an over-the-counter, dealer-based market. That means the iNAV of a fund like HYG is based not on the last trade for each bond it holds (which could literally be days old), but on a pricing services estimate of how much each bond is worth. That leads to the appearance of premiums or discounts that swing to +/- 1%.

To read the full article, please click here

Bond ETFs Are Growing At Fastest Pace On Record

MarketMuse update profiles the billions of dollars that have flowed into bond ETFs over the past few years and an in depth look at the reasoning behind it courtesy of the Wall Street Journal .

wall_street_journal_logoInstitutions are piling into exchange-traded bond funds at the fastest pace on record, driven by forces reshaping the increasingly illiquid corporate-debt market and their desire to stay nimble ahead of expected interest-rate moves.

Bond ETFs took in $32 billion globally this year through Feb. 26, according to data from Bloomberg LP, in what has been the strongest start to any year since the funds began in 2002.

More than half the $20 billion that flowed into fixed-income ETFs atBlackRock Inc. ’s iShares unit in the first eight weeks of this year came from institutions such as insurers and endowments. In some large funds, institutional money in ETFs has more than doubled in the past few years, the firm said.

The shift is the latest good news for providers of exchange-traded funds, which essentially are index-tracking funds that trade like stocks. Bond ETFs are already popular with individual investors because they have low fees and are easy to trade, qualities that are now appealing to more sophisticated investors who typically focus on hand-picking individual debt securities to beat their benchmarks.

“There was a monster rotation into fixed-income ETFs in February,” coming out of sector-based stock funds, said Reginald Browne, global co-head of ETF market making at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. He said a client recently traded $1.8 billion in bond ETFs in a single trade.

A host of factors is behind institutions’ adoption of bond ETFs, analysts say. Among them: Deteriorating liquidity in corporate bonds has frustrated large investors as many individual bonds have become difficult to buy or sell quickly at a given price, thanks in part to rules limiting banks’ risk-taking.

For the entire article from the Wall Street Journals’ Katy Burne, click here.

Corporate Bond ETFs: Trading Underlying Issues Is Not So Easy For Many Pros

Greenwich Associates study reveals difficulty in executing corporate bond trades; Transparency and Liquidity are Lacking

MarketsMuse update courtesy of extract from Jan 23 Wall Street Letter, followed by our own comments (thanks to our Exec Editor’s providing more than average knowledge of corporate bond trading and the assortment of electronic exchange initiatives intended to increase transparency and liquidity in the corporate bond marketplace, one that is notorious for being a less-than-transparent over-the-counter market place)

wall-street-letter-logoBuy-side firms are experiencing difficulties executing corporate bond trades of more than $15m, a study by Greenwich Associates has revealed.

According to the findings, 80% of the institutional investors report troubles when executing larger trades, which reflect a decline in market liquidity caused in large part by the pullback of fixed-income dealers in the wake of new and more stringent capital reserve requirements.

With dealer inventories shrinking, investors’ search for new liquidity providers is proving a boon to the fast-developing ranks of electronic trading platforms.

All-to-all trading, previously unheard of in corporate bond markets, accounted for an estimated 6% of electronically executed US trades in 2014 as a sign that market dynamics are evolving, the report said.

The report entitled US Corporate Bond Trading: A Multitude of Platforms Give Investors Options, identified 18 emerging electronic platforms competing for the corporate bond trading in the US. Continue reading