It's all relative: Euro CLO mezz rallies to follow month-long IG/HY compression
European credit suffered this week with Brexit talks between the UK and the EU dragging on and both sides conceding that a trade deal is unlikely to be reached by Sunday’s deadline. But European CLO tranches have held up reasonably well with mezzanine spreads tightening by almost 13% in December

LP round up: Arcmont, Ares and Sixth Street win European direct lending mandates
Investors have allocated around $2 billion to credit funds in recent weeks, according to board documentation seen by Creditflux. Among those to recieve allocations include ADM, Arcmont, Ares, Audax, Bain, Centerbridge, Clearlake, Goldman Sachs merchant banking,  Invesco, Monarch, Oaktree, Raven, Sixth Street and Sound Mark

Europe leads corporate credit rally, but US outperforms in CLOs
iTraxx Crossover has been the CDS market's outperformer this week, tightening over 30 basis points, or 11.4%, to trade at 235bp today. But in the CLO market, US deals have come out on top thanks to a BlackRock CLO that priced its double Bs at some of the tightest levels this year

Compression plays out as HY and European CLO double Bs outperform
Investment grade and high yield credit spreads have tightened in sync with each other this week, but CDS and CLOs alike underline that the big theme over the past month has been compression between investment grade and high yield

Onex targets high yield bonds after bumper year of US bond issuance
Onex Credit is fundraising for Onex High Yield Bond Fund, according to SEC filings seen by Creditflux

Credit fundraising: distressed keeps in favour but CLO ETFs emerge
Five months into global lockdown and distressed debt funds are still proving popular, but several managers have found success pitching other types of credit strategies

Fund performance: Credit funds post double-digit gains
June returns have once again been led by CLO funds, as seven out of the top 10 belong to our CLOs category.

Don’t be a hero: managers opt to go market-neutral
There’s yet more volatility in store later this year — that’s the consensus according to credit portfolio managers that have spoken to Creditflux. What they are unsure about is the scale and direction of this movement, which is leading them to prune their portfolios with an emphasis on market-neutral tactics

They said it: "Imagine a garden party and all of a sudden a big wasp shows up"
On Creditflux’s US CLO webinar last month, Napier Park’s head of US CLO investments Serhan Secmen described the March sell-off as a garden party

Banks and high yield corps lead charge as results prompt European rally
High yield corporate credit is today's outperforming part of the market as European credit rallies back from its recent wides, as the latest round of earnings proves stronger than many had expected

US and Europe diverge as loan trading bands emerge on the continent
Europe and the US are on different courses with credit indices having drifted apart over the past month, say trading sources. Europe is expected to suffer fewer defaults to the extent that "it’s getting quite difficult for borrowers to default”, as one source put it. But the US has "higher growth potential due to its more dynamic economy"

Beneath the triple C: downgrade rate slows as $8 billion of CLO loans tumble
May offered some respite to CLO portfolios as corporate downgrades to triple C were reduced heavily - affecting just $6.67 billion of US CLO paper and €1.09 billion of European CLO portfolios

Frontier CDS auction pays less than bonds had indicated
A credit event auction to settle Frontier Communications CDS produced a slightly better result than expected for protection sellers

If history repeats itself, the best CLO play could be to hold equities
After a futile scramble for liquidity, LyondellBasel filed for bankruptcy in the early morning hours of 6 January 2009. Bad luck for CLO managers that were holding the loan? Not at all

Huge CDS gap yawns between US and Europe, despite Fed intervention
Having crossed paths in a rare moment of compression on Monday, iTraxx Europe and its US counterpart CDX IG have since undergone one of their biggest moments of dislocation since the global financial crisis, as an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve failed to comfort investors about the impact of the coronavirus on the US economy

Europe rallies hard after CDX IG closes tighter for first time since June
Volatility in credit remains heightened due to the coronavirus outbreak, but movement has become two-way, with European CDS indices surging tighter today after US index CDX IG ended yesterday’s session tighter than iTraxx Europe for the first time in nine months

Trump tariffs and oil slip dent Europe vs US credit decompression trades
Underperformance of US credit derivative indices at the end of last week has created a trading entry point for those still convinced that Europe has more problems. But bearish factors continue to coalesce on both sides of the Atlantic

Market rout drives US/Europe credit convergence, as Brazil leads Latin widening
Credit spreads have sharply widened globally as financial markets are being rocked by concerns for a trade war and rising US rates. An equity-led rout in the US yesterday afternoon

Emerging market credit manager eyes CBO in $293.75 million deal
A Florida-based manager has hired Jefferies to arrange an emerging market CBO

Ares switches to C-Corp structure as it announces "record year" in earnings release
Ares has announced a change to its corporate tax status in an earnings release that described 2017 as “a record year” for the firm

Blackstone's credit AUM up 48% YoY as firm announces "exceptional" results
The firm's credit business enjoyed composite gross returns of 11.2% for performing credit and 7.7% for distressed strategies in 2017

US pensions look beyond equities
US pension funds dramatically lowered their allocations to equity in the decade ending in 2016 as they diversified into illiquid and alternative assets. By Grace Jennings-Edquist

They said it: long faces on flow traders
Citi’s Jim Hughes tells the Creditflux CLO Investor Summit about how difficult life is for flow credit traders

Retail sector ailments could easily turn into pandemic
Credit’s retail malady is infectious and uncontainable as retailers face up to obsolete business models