Pimco, Loomis Favor Convertibles as Stocks Rise: Credit Markets

Pimco, Loomis Favor Convertibles as Stocks Rise: Credit Markets
Sapna Maheshwari and John Detrixhe
Published on Jan 04, 2011, 3:30 PM
Pacific Investment Management Co. and Loomis Sayles & Co. are betting convertible debt will rally as stocks rise and Treasuries fall.
Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Pacific Investment Management Co. and Loomis Sayles & Co. are betting convertible debt will rally as stocks rise and Treasuries fall.
Bonds that may be exchanged for shares returned 16.8 percent last year, beating Treasuries, benchmark U.S. stock indexes, high-yield and investment-grade corporate notes and municipal debt, Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data show.
Fixed-income investors are turning to convertibles amid signs the U.S. economy is improving. While the Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 10.76 percent in the fourth quarter, including reinvested dividends, Treasuries lost 2.7 percent. The Pimco Total Return Fund, the world's largest mutual fund, is allowing investments in equity-linked securities for the first time since 2003. The $19.4 billion Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, which beat 98 percent of fixed-income funds in the past five years, also is investing in convertibles.
"You're starting to see for the first time interest rates tick up a little bit, and people are realizing what happens in their fixed-income portfolios when that takes place," said Justin Kass, a money manager who helps oversee $2.8 billion of convertibles at Allianz Global Investors Capital in San Diego. "We've been a big beneficiary of shifts in the past three months in terms of flows in our growth funds."
Berkshire Hathaway Bonds
Sales of convertibles may soar to $50 billion in 2011, closer to "historic levels," said Prasanth Burri Rao-Kathi, head of Americas equity-linked capital markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York. Issuance tumbled to $33.8 billion in 2010, the slowest period in 14 years.
Elsewhere in credit markets, Bank of America Corp. credit- default swaps tumbled after the lender resolved its loan-putback dispute with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. sold $1.5 billion of senior debt to retire floating-rate notes. CommScope Inc., which is being taken private by Carlyle Group, will meet with lenders this week to market a loan to help fund the company's buyout.
Contracts on Bank of America dropped 21.7 basis points to 156 basis points, according to data provider CMA. The biggest U.S. lender by assets paid $2.8 billion to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae after the companies demanded it buy back mortgages they said were based on faulty data.
Mortgage buyers including Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are trying to force lenders to repurchase loans that may have been made with incorrect data on income and home values.
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Default Swaps Fall
The cost of protecting U.S. corporate bonds from default fell by the most in a month. The Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index, which investors use to hedge against losses on corporate debt or to speculate on creditworthiness, dropped 1.7 basis points to a mid-price of 83.4 basis points as of 5:48 p.m. in New York, according to Markit Group Ltd.
The measure typically declines as investor confidence improves and rises as it deteriorates.
The Markit iTraxx Asia index of 50 investment-grade borrowers outside Japan was little changed at 99 basis points as of 8:25 a.m. in Hong Kong, Credit Agricole CIB prices show. Credit swaps pay the buyer face value if a borrower fails to meet its obligations, less the value of the defaulted debt. A basis point equals $1,000 annually in a contract protecting $10 million of debt.
Berkshire Hathaway issued $375 million of 3-year floating- rate debt that pays 33 basis points more than the 3-month London interbank offered rate and the same amount of 3-year, 1.5 percent fixed-rate notes that pay 58 basis points more than similar-maturity Treasuries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The Omaha, Nebraska-based company also issued $750 million of 10-year, 4.25 percent notes that pay a spread of 95 basis points, or 0.95 percentage point.
Citigroup Most Active
Berkshire Hathaway Finance, a funding arm that was created in 2003, will use proceeds to repay floating-rate notes maturing this year, the company said in a regulatory filing yesterday. The unit has $1.5 billion of the debt maturing on Jan. 11, Bloomberg data show.
Bonds from New York-based Citigroup Inc. were the most actively traded U.S. corporate securities by dealers, with 110 trades of $1 million or more, according to Trace, the bond-price reporting system of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
The S&P/LSTA US Leveraged Loan 100 Index climbed for a sixth straight day, rising 0.02 cent to 92.93 cents on the dollar, the highest since Jan. 21, 2008. The index tracks the 100 largest dollar-denominated first-lien leveraged loans. Leveraged loans and junk bonds are rated below Baa3 at Moody's Investors Service and lower than BBB- at S&P.
CommScope Meeting
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is arranging the $1 billion, seven- year debt for CommScope, according to a person familiar with the transaction who declined to be identified because the matter is private. A lender meeting is set for 9:30 a.m. on Jan. 5 in New York, the person said.
Shareholders approved the $3.9 billion acquisition on Dec. 30, the Hickory, North Carolina-based telecommunications- equipment maker said in a statement. Last month, CommScope and JPMorgan began selling a $400 million asset-backed revolving credit line that is part of the transaction.
Rick Aspan, a spokesman for CommScope, didn't return a telephone call seeking comment.
In emerging markets, relative yields fell 8 basis points to 236 basis points, according to JPMorgan index data.
Gains on convertible securities last year compare with 9.5 percent on high-grade corporate debt, 15.2 percent on speculative-grade company securities and 2.3 percent on state and local debt, Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data show. The S&P 500 Index gained 15.1 percent in 2010, including reinvested dividends, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 14.1 percent.
Fed Futures
Treasuries lost 1.8 percent in December, the worst performance in a year, Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data show.
Rising profits and cash balances will push the S&P 500 Index to the biggest three-year advance since the 1990s, surpassing forecasts for below-average returns, strategists at Wall Street's biggest banks said last month.
Futures contracts on the Chicago Board of Trade show a 31 percent chance Federal Reserve policy makers will raise their target rate for overnight loans between banks by at least a quarter-percentage point by their November meeting. The Fed has held the target at zero to 0.25 percent for more than two years.
"If you think stock prices are going to be higher and it's going to be driven by an overall high level of prices in general because of an uptick in inflation, I would probably say I want bonds that give me some upside to the pricing environment," said Daniel Welch, a New York-based managing director who oversees convertible sales and trading at brokerage Piper Jaffray Cos.
'Biggest Player'
The Pimco Total Return Fund may put as much as 10 percent of assets in securities including preferred stock and convertible bonds as soon as the second quarter, the Newport Beach, California-based money manager said in a Dec. 16 regulatory filing. The fund won't invest in common stock, it said.
"If you look at what the biggest player in the bond market is doing, it gives you an indication of what the trend is going to be," Welch said. "There's a reason Pimco is looking at equity-linked products and making a push there."
The Loomis Sayles Bond Fund owns convertible securities, which can be exchanged for common shares at a premium to the market price, from Intel Corp., Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and Ford Motor Co., Bloomberg data show.
"Rather than going too far down in quality, we're saying we'll take some equity risk," said Kathleen Gaffney, a Boston- based co-manager of the Loomis Sayles Bond Fund. "What we're trying to capture is good cash flow and growth in earnings."
Exchange Option
A stock market rally in December triggered conversion rights on securities from Hertz Global Holdings Inc., the largest publicly traded U.S. rental-car service, and Gaylord Entertainment Co., owner of country music's Grand Ole Opry, according to separate statements from the companies yesterday.
Convertibles are typically attractive to issuers when companies don't expect a gain in their equities to trigger a swap, adding to outstanding stock and cutting the stake of existing shareowners.
"Investors are looking for yield and they want to be invested in equities, but some of them are nervous to take on the whole equity risk," said Ellen Gold, co-manager of the $165.3 million Invesco Convertible Securities Fund. "So we're seeing investors who are using the convertible market as a way to play equities with downside protection."
--With assistance from Hugh Son, Dawn Kopecki, Krista Giovacco, Alexis Xydias and Whitney Kisling in New York and Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam in Boston. Editors: Alan Goldstein, Ed Johnson
To contact the reporters on this story: Sapna Maheshwari in New York at sapnam@bloomberg.net; John Detrixhe in New York at jdetrixhe1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Alan Goldstein at agoldstein5@bloomberg.net
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