Some market statistics for us to chew upon.
There has been approximately 147 new SGD dollar corporate bond issues in 2014 and 138 new issues in 2013.
Extracting those that are trading under 99.50 (to allow for margin of errors in the prices), I’ve compiled this list of 2013 and 2014 papers that are “under-performing” and ranked them according to their losses.
I found that 42 (29%) of the 2014 issues are trading under water, i.e. trading under 99.5, compared to 32 (23%) of the 2013 issues, assuming that the reference prices I used are accurate enough.
We note that, invariably, these are those smacked down O&G names with some, recently issued as well.
But in the list, we have the HDB, CDL and supranationals, as well, reflecting the higher short end, 1-5 year, interest rates over the past year
My first thoughts are, it is not ......