We last ranked the best value 10 year fixed rate corporate bond issues on August 4, 2014. Today we rank the best value corporate bond trades with daily trading volume of at least $5 million and maturities of 10 years or longer on August 11, 2014. On August 11 in the U.S. bond market, there were 15,965 bond trades in 2,959 senior non-call fixed rate corporate bond issues representing $3.8 billion in notional principal. Which 20 trades were the best trades of the day, and how do we decide the answer to that question? Today, we answer those questions for bonds with maturities of 10 years or longer.
Conclusion: We find the best-value non-call senior fixed rate 10 year maturity or longer bond trades on August 11, 2014 were issues by these firms:
KINDER MORGAN ENERGY PARTNERS LP (KMP)
EL PASO LLC (EP), 2 issues
JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. (JPM)
ENCANA CORPORATION (ECA)
CITIGROUP INC. (C)
SAFEWAY INC. (SWY)
TIME WARNER CABLE INC. (TWC)
WEYERHAEUSER CO. (WY)
DIRECTV HOLDINGS LLC (DTV)
BHP BILLITON FINANCE (USA) LTD (BHP)
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION (IBM)
UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION (UTX)
PEPSICO INC. (PEP)
UNITED PARCEL SERVICE INC. (UPS)
E I DU PONT DE NEMOURS AND CO. (DD)
ANHEUSER-BUSCH INBEV FINANCE INC. (BUD)
CBS CORPORATION (CBS)
TIME WARNER INC. (TWX)
ORACLE CORPORATION (ORCL)
Best Value 10 Year or Longer Bond Trades for August 11, 2014
In analyzing the best trades of the day, we used these criteria:
Bond type: Fixed rate
Callability: Non-call
Seniority: Senior debt
Trade Volume: $5 million or more
Maturity: 10 years or longer
Ratings: Ignored
We ignored legacy ratings in making today’s selection, but only three of the trades meeting our criteria did not have an investment grade rating by the pre-Dodd Frank Act definition. We used the same criterion for “best” that we have used in recent analyses of bonds issued by AT&T Inc. (T), American International Group (AIG), Barclays PLC (BARC), Apple Inc. (AAPL), and Google Inc. (GOOG). That criterion is the reward to risk ratio, calculated as the ratio of credit spread to matched-maturity default probability. The default probabilities used are described in detail in thedaily default probability analysis posted by Kamakura Corporation. Both the credit spreads and default probabilities are reported as percent figures. The text of the Dodd-Frank legislation as it concerns the definition of “investment grade” is summarized at the end of our analysis of Citigroup (C) bonds published December 9, 2013.
The reason that we do this ranking is that credit spreads do not widen in a consistent way as the default probability of the issuer increases, as shown in this graph of all bonds with trade volume of at least $5 million on August 11, 2014:
In all, there were 36 issues that met our criteria. The distribution of credit spreads is given in this histogram:
The median credit spread was 1.592% and the average credit spread was 1.873%. The distribution of the credit spread to default probability ratio is given in this histogram:
The median credit spread to default probability ratio was 8.927 and the average was 10.915.
The ranking results are shown below, listed with the best ratio numbered 1, with a Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP bond issue the winner at a reward to risk ratio of 37.2 times.
CUSIPs
Many investors have requested that we provide CUSIPs as part of this chart. Redistribution of CUSIPs is currently illegal under Kamakura Corporation’s contract with the data vendor. We are working hard to change this so that we may make CUSIPs available in the future. This article neatly summarizes which institutions have restricted availability of CUSIPs in order to maximize their profits as a monopoly supplier of the data. Thanks to FINRA, the CUSIPs have been put into the public domain for free via this FINRA-affiliated website.
Background on the Calculations
Assuming the recovery rate in the event of default would be the same on all bond issues, a sophisticated investor who has moved beyond legacy ratings seeks to maximize revenue per basis point of default risk from each incremental investment, subject to risk limits on macro-factor exposure on a fully default-adjusted basis.
Maximizing the ratio of credit spread to matched-maturity default probabilities requires that default probabilities be available at a wide range of maturities. We used the default probabilities supplied by Kamakura Corporation’s KRIS default probability service, interpolated to a matched-maturity basis to the exact day of bond maturity. For maturities longer than ten years, we assume that the ten year default probability is a good estimate of default risk.
Bond yields are secured from TRACE. The National Association of Securities Dealers launched the TRACE ( Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine) system in July 2002 in order to increase price transparency in the U.S. corporate debt market. The system captures information on secondary market transactions in publicly traded securities (investment grade, high yield and convertible corporate debt) representing all over-the-counter market activity in these bonds.
We used the trade-weighted average yield reported by TRACE for each of the bond issues analyzed. We calculated the credit spread using the matched-maturity yield on U.S. Treasury bonds, interpolated from the Federal Reserve H15 statistical release for the trade date. The source of the information on the H15 release is the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Forward-Looking Best Value Bond Selection
Today’s analysis looks back at yesterday’s trades. A forward-looking bond selection based on today’s prices at this instant is done in the same way, with slight differences in the data sources.
Author’s Note
Regular readers of these notes are aware that we generally do not list the major news headlines relevant to the firms in question. We believe that other authors on SeekingAlpha, Yahoo, at The New York Times, The Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal do a fine job of this. Our omission of those headlines is intentional. Similarly, to argue that a specific news event is more important than all other news events in the outlook for the firm is something we again believe is inappropriate for this author. Our focus is on current bond prices, credit spreads, and default probabilities, key statistics that we feel are critical for both fixed income and equity investors.