High Yield

UPDATE: HYG's premium to Net Asset Value (NAV) is its highest since May09!!

We often discuss how credit markets have provided useful insights (and potential pre-emptive indications) with regard to risk appetite and whether ES should rip and today's incredible rally in HYG (the high yield credit bond ETF) is one to be aware (beware) of. The rumble of liquidity-driven hedging being unwound was very loud indeed and as spreads reach significant levels on a medium-term basis and HYG recovers its major drop in price, we wonder if the market is now less prepared to handle any downside shock especially as risk-appetite is clearly dragging even in high-concession primary issue land. Much of today's action in the high yield credit market seemed as much about catch up to each segment's relative-value as any real aggressive buying as hedges were clearly unwound. We would warn traders who use index aggregates to judge relative asset allocations between credit and equity to be very careful with this shift, as bottom-up, it does not exist yet.

This week's trifecta of key financial developments, that go far deeper than superficial headlines, namely China, Morgan Stanley (and European bank exposure in general) and the equity-credit disconnect, just got another major push. CNBC just interviewed Tim Backshall (of Capital Context) to discuss the dramatic moves in MS credit risk (which we mentioned earlier) and in an undeniably convincing accent (British, Aussie, South African?), he managed to bring many of our broader concerns into focus including global financial contagion, bank funding, Chinese growth, and high yield credit. We also learned that ZeroHedge is a blog.

We wish we had some good news to report this morning.... But we don't.

More flashing red recessionary indicators are coming courtesy of the largely ignored High Yield market, which following a 5.3% decline is, as Bank of America (itself ironically contributing substantially to the blow out) says, is shaping up to be "among the worst months in the HY market's 25 year history, in a bad company of post-Lehman, post-WorldCom, post-9/11, and post-Russia sell-offs. The difference of course is that we did not have the largest bankruptcy in history taking place (LEH or WCOM shared that title at a time), no terror attack, and no outright sovereign default (Russia in Aug ’98). What we did have however, is a global risk-off trade, sparked by concerns that this fragile environment could slip into a double-dip recession as consumer and business confidence fails to sustain repeated beating from sovereign and financial systemic risk issues." What we also did have is the near end of the modern ponzi economic model, whose viability was once again extended courtesy of a variety of sticky objects thrown at the wall with hopes one sticks. For now the obliteration has been halted, although one thing is undeniable - central planner intervention buys increasingly less and less time. We are confident that August is just the beggining of pain for not only HY, but all other asset classes. And some more ammo for those who like comparing 2011 to 2008: "Parallels are being drawn between today’s environment and that of 2008, given the degree of equity destruction that has taken place across the financial space. Financial CDS – the epitome of ’08 systemic risk – are trading at an average of 190bp in the US, within reach of Oct ’08 levels, and 240bp in Europe, well north of their ’08 wides." What do spreads imply? Nothing short of recession: "The HY index, in the meantime, has widened to 739bp as of close on Thursday, its widest level since Nov 2009. With the spread normally peaking at 1,000bps in full recessionary periods2 (1991 and 2001-02) and bottoming at 250bp in times of strong economic growth, the current level is pricing in an 80% probability of a fullblown contraction in GDP, and a 100% chance of a mild recession."

I am back to being bearish the high yield market. I am not yet short it, but would certainly recommend being underweight right now. A couple of things have pushed me back to being bearish. The main one is weakness in other credit markets. Once again CMBX is heading lower and back at or near its recent lows. It has not been able to sustain a big rally which is particularly surprising because it is relatively illiquid and is a 'hedge' trade so is usually very exposed to a violent short squeeze. Irish and Portuguese 10 year bond hit new record yields according to Bloomberg - 11.47% and 10.99% respectively at the time of the writing, though Portugal broke 11% earlier in the day...The combination of weakness in other credit markets, coupled by the HYG NAV confirming that liquidity is at an extreme low in the high yield bond market I think it is prudent to cut high yield risk. With European credit closing quite weakly, I may shift to an outright short.

Utilizing The Applied Finance Group’s backtest system, we ran a strategy of investing only in companies with a market capitalization of greater than US$ 1 Billion and a dividend yield above 3%. The strategy has worked fairly well with the annualized returns over the last 12 years beating the overall universe. While the dividend paying strategy worked well, a strategy based on AFG’s valuation metric performed better.

Just out per Lipper, High Yield recorded its largest weekly outflow ever with a negative $2.8 billion this week. Presumably this is due to the risk off mood in the markets carried over from last week, or maybe just more funds converting out of fixed income and pumping into equities in advance of what even the futures just seem to realize is an inevitability (go ahead, check out the ES chart AH, we dare you). That said, per ICI there was a 3rd consecutive outflow from domestic equity, so perhaps this was simply derisking. Continuing on the Lipper news, the 4 week average dropped from $181 million of inflows to $641 million in outflows, pushing the year to date down by half to just $2.9 billion in inflows. On the other hand, loan funds continues being John Holmes with $9.5 billion in YTD inflows, although just $57 million (down from $686 million) in the last week.

The shift in risk perception is on. While stock are not quite feeling it yet (they will), today's fulcrum security appears to be high yield debt, as tracked by the JNK ETF. A quick look at the most active options classes page shows something surprising: as of 2:30pm Eastern roughly 4250 puts had trade, compared to.... 4 calls. Yet while investors have certainly turned sour on junk very rapidly, they should be far more bearish on stocks. Not only have stocks outperformaed bonds far more during the QE2 rally (as expected), but a simple correlation model accounting for empirical beta confirms that the SPY is almost 12% rich to fair value as implied by the JNK. Which means that if investors are really bearish on high yield to the tune of 4250 to 4, they should be far more bearish on the stock market.

With today's $35 billion 5 year auction pricing at 1.41%, we continue to see confirmation that the recent strength in the belly of the curve is quickly turning into pronounced weakness. The Bid To Cover was 2.65, the lowest since June or 2.58, but most notably those mysterious Directs came and took down a record 15.6% of the auction: the largest in history. Offsetting this was the complete collapse in Indirect interest, as foreign institutions took only 31.5% of the auction, the lowest Indirect take down since April 2009. The result was that Primary Dealers got stuck with saving the auction as usual, taking down more than half, or 52.9% to be precise, the highest since June. That foreign interest in the bond was so low is not surprising to us: as we highlighted yesterday, the Fed is now the largest holder of US Treasury debt. At this point the divergence will accelerate, as PDs and the Fed end up owning ever more of each and every auction (and subsequent monetization), while China et al is increasingly relegated to stand by status.

I missed a big part of the high yield run-up.  I even said there was an implosion eminent in Q2 2010.  Boy was I wrong.

• I underestimated the capacity for debt restructuring.
• I didn’t appreciate the power of extreme monetary policy.  I didn’t research economists with useful first-hand knowledge.
• I missed some implications of market-maker change.  OTC derivatives are not evil.  They function mostly to control market makers’ huge aggregate risk in an increasingly illiquid secondary market. 

To begin: credit has some nice features.  The price-to-hopefulness ratio is never a part of valuation.  Few have trouble parting with a bond when the price is right.  There is a fuzzy but ever-present upside limit.  There is a downside bounded by the recovery rate.  There are simple opening lines: acquiring higher yield implies taking more risk by 1) lengthening term risk, 2) taking more credit risk, 3) moving down the capital structure or 4) some combination.  In the large, I avoided 2).

The US government is another $35 billion in the debt sink hole. The cost of this marginal addition to our existing debt load ($10 trillion? $100 trillion? who cares) was just 1.055%, which was gobbled up briskly at a 3.20 Bid To Cover. The bulk of the buying came from Primary Dealers who took down the highest portion of the auction, or 45.1%, since May of 2009, when PDs were responsible for 56.6% of the takedown. Indirect bidders, coming in at 40.6%, was the lowest indirect take down since January, when they were responsible for just 38%. The balance of 14.3% was left to the Direct Bidders. The Bid To Cover at 3.20 came in well above the LTM average of 3.03%.

Today's 5 Year $38 billion auction came in at a 1.995% high yield: not a record, unlike yesterday's 2 Year Auction, but still the lowest since April of 2009, when it was 1.93. The high yield came in 3.4 bps weak of the When Issued. The Bid To Cover came in at 2.58, compared to last auction's 2.71, and right on the one year average of 2.58. Direct bidders came in at 10.4%, indirects, at 34.6% were the lowest since July 2009, while primary Dealers took down the highest amount, or 55%, since July 2009 as well. Median yield was 1.925 and the low yield was 1.80%, with 18.36% allotted at the high yield of 1.995%.

The $40 billion 2 Year closed at a high yield of 0.738%, about 2 bps inside of expectations of 0.751%. The traditional bizarro day Bid To Cover came in at the second highest in history, or 3.45, lower only to the 3.63 from October of 2009. Not surprisingly, Direct Bidders once again carried the auction, taking down 21.3%, which also was just short of the second highest ever, compared to the 26.14% that the UK based "funds" took down in October of last year. The median yield came in at 0.72% and the low was 0.647%. 70.18% was allotted at the high. Primary Dealer hit ratio was 16.58%, one of the lowest ever as PDs continue to launder the Fed's dirty monetization scheme via prior auction repo cash. All in all, the farce will continue until it can't.

Lipper/AMG has announced the most recent fund flow number: in the past week high yield funds saw a $310 million outflow, bringing total year to date flows to ($365) million. This is the sixth consecutive weekly outflow and brings total cumulative withdrawals for the period to $4.6 billion - a new all time record, even worse than the 2003 inactivity stretch. In percentage-of-assets terms this translates into 4.9%, the largest such figure in five years. And after running a $5 billion YTD surplus earlier in the year, this has all now been reversed. Elsewhere, inflows were seen in loans (+$95mn) and HG bonds (+1.2bn), whereas EM debt and developed equities saw outflows of $70mn and $2.8bn respectively. Money Markets continue to bleed, with $1.3 billion in outflow in the past week. So far in 2010 MMs have lost 13% of their entire asset base. The delta between MM outflows and all other risk asset inflow is now $113 billion.

Last week was the fifth consecutive week of HY mutual fund outflows, which while smaller than the prior week's $1.4 billion, was still a material $759 million. With that the five consecutive weeks of HY outflows now stand at $4.3 billion, which is the second largest 5 week sequential outflow from HY funds in history, only better compared to the $4.9 billion in August of 2003. With the disappointing end of week performance in stocks last week, we anticipate that next week Lipper/AMG will announce another huge outflow. With this week's HY outflow, YTD flows are now just barely positive at $898 million. Yet the HY action was nothing compared to the unprecedented, if not record, outflow in domestic equities: ICI reports that the week ended May 26 had $13.4 billion in domestic equity outflows: a number the likes of which we don't recall even in the post-Lehman days. Curiously, even as flows out of all risky assets picked up, money market had yet another outflow of $11.5 billion, bringing total YTD money market outflows to $414 billion, or -12.9% of total money market assets. Ironically, the only asset class (aside from gold) outperforming this year is the dollar. Instead of keeping capital invested in cash, Americans have shifted nearly half a trillion out of the best performing asset in 2010.