Singapore Market Buzz And Update

Another little research firm has published a scathing report on Nobel, comparing it to Enron. https://icebergresearch.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/report-1-associates-and-agri-15022015.pdf

The stock price is down almost 8% on the day.

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In conjunction with another article on CoCos to be published later this afternoon, I pulled out a list of discounted high yield bonds in SGD and realise we have little to choose from.

SGD HIGH YIELD BONDS

I notice certain anomalies in the offshore names like Unicredit SGD LT2 paper that is a sub debt (non Basel 3 compliant) and the Trafigura SGD perpetual, both trading way off scale from their USD equivalents.

Trafigura USD 7.625% perpetual (callable 04/2018) was last done at 7% while the SGD perp (callable 02/2019) is indicating a rough yield of about 8.6%.

Unicredit USD 8% perpetual (callable 06/2024) and rated BB- is yielding 8.04% while the superior Unicredit SGD sub is indicating 7.6%.

Tata Steel SGD 4.95% 05/2023 is in line with the Tata USD 5.95% 07/24 which is giving 5.69%.

On the topic of CoCos in SGD dollar, I compiled a table of SGD bank perps and found our local banks have 3 Basel 3 compliant perps out there, 2 out of UOB and 1 from DBS, OCBC has none.

SGD BANK PERPS

The yields do not look too hot compared to the hard currency perps that I talked about in my other post because we shall have to assume that these non compliant perps will be called back at any instance given that there is a Change of Qualification Event.

The prospectuses all carry the right for the banks to exercise a redemption should the perps cease to qualify as Tier 1 capital of the bank.

In any case, if the bank chooses to call back the shares tomorrow, any price above 100 (+ about 30 days coupon) is not a good price.

And it is no use holding out on them in this case although I heard some interesting gossip the other day about how a hedge fund profited handsomely from holding out on the Goodpack bond buyback exercise last year.

Moral of the story : Retail buyers always lose out.