Leveragedloans
BKLN vs. HYG | Leveraged Loans Underperforming High YieldEarlier this year I pointed out how leveraged loans are increasingly in a precarious position as underlying economic fundamentals deteriorate around the world. Another way of measuring the risk premium is to observe the performance spread between the leverage loan bonds (orange line) and high yield bonds (candles). Both are in logarithmic scale.
Leveraged Loans | Corporate Risk Premium Crisis?Many of you may not be familiar with leveraged loans and the ETFs that have become available to investors through funds over the last few years, but they are important to understand in order to have an edge over the rest of the markets these days - whether that's traditional equities, commodities, derivatives or crypto - as wealth preservation will be a big theme during 2019/2020. Investors have been driven into leveraged loans and related products sharply since the Financial Crisis as a result of record low interest rates in developed markets caused by experimental monetary policy; investors have been desperate for yield! And so we have seen very low risk premium spreads between "risky" junk paper and "risk free" treasury paper as a result of distortions in the marketplace. This spread is currently in the single digits, but during the Financial Crisis - when credit flow started to freeze - the spread skyrocketed into the 40 point range! Treasuries have only room to go lower in the event of a credit crisis and so one can imagine that risky corporate paper will be the victim of such a scenario as companies no longer get access to cheap credit. This will put huge pressure on corporate yields, resulting in defaults and deeply discounted paper.
FYI: The Quantity Theory of Credit is my theoretical and empirical inclination.
Anyway, keep an eye on leveraged loans and the ETF carrying them. Due to the way these ETFs are held by funds they also carry significant redemption risks, which can cause a run on the funds that issue them and cause funds to panic sell to meet redemption requests from investors. I'm sure there are a few strategies one could devise to take advantage of such a scenario ;)
