“Bankers want to push deals and issuers are looking to take advantage of lower yields,” said Michael Kastner, managing principal at Halyard Asset Management. He expected a flurry of deals before the middle of December, though investors had become more discerning about credit risk, he said. “Corporate deals are not getting done as easily as […]
Michael Kastner, principal at Halyard Asset Management, investigates the impact that incoming legislative changes to money market funds could have on a family office Private Asset Management December 2014
October 2014 As we wrote last month, illiquidity and investor nervousness wreaked havoc on the junk bond market as investors attempted, en masse, to liquidate their junk holdings. That nervousness carried over into the broad capital markets in October in trading that was reminiscent of October 2008. The economy is clearly on solid footing and […]
Michael Kastner, managing principal at Halyard Asset Management says: “There is a view that the Fed will lose its nerve given all the market volatility.” Central bankers had already forfeited markets’ full confidence before this week; now they are starting to be intimidated by them. Wild price swings are flashback to crisis
“Margin is a concern and can certainly result in you being taken out of a trade,” says Michael Kastner, managing principal at Halyard Asset Management. But there are silver linings. One resides in companies’ hefty stock buy back programmes, says Mr Kastner. “I’m constructive on the share market as companies have a mandate to buy […]
September 2014 Bond investors turned cautious last month, reversing the upward trend in price witnessed for much of this year. As the Federal Reserve meeting concluded on September 17th, investors were hungry for clues as to when the FOMC would move to raise interest rates. Instead, the Fed further confused matters with the announcement that […]
Below is a chart, we think you might find interesting. We plot the total number of employees counted in the non-farm payroll survey (left scale 000s) and the number of Job openings (right scale, 000s) as tracked by the BLS’ JOLTs survey. Key observations: Number of Job openings has surpassed last previous peak Number of […]
We put together a quick graph of short term interest rates and the market’s expectations of future rates. The current LIBOR curve as measured by the LIBOR Futures market predicts rates to rise to between 1.09% and 1.95% from December 2015 to September 2016 (Charted as the blue shaded line below). We then assumed that […]
The bond market staged a strong rally in the liquidity-starved month of August as professional traders and arbitrageurs squeezed shorts, pushing bond prices higher and the yield curve flatter. The rally came despite continued economic strength and was accomplished in conjunction with a rally in equity prices. Typically, bond and stock prices move in the […]
“The demand for bonds has been so great in recent years that people have looked beyond the credit rating as they just want yield – any type of yield,” says Michael Kastner of Halyard Asset Management. Corporate bond ratings do not discern risk