Technical support for Euro IG; around 4% of the market set to mature this month

Benjamin Franklin said that death and taxes were the only inevitabilities in life. I’d like to add the discussion of the January effect to his list. Every year I receive at least one piece of commentary telling me that January is always a good month for risk assets (we’re far from innocent ourselves – see here).

Basing investment decisions purely on seasonal anomalies isn’t a particularly reliable investment process and the sensible investor should take other, more robust information into account when making changes to their portfolio.

The improving economic outlook for Europe and the general lack of pessimism should help the European credit market rally this month. So too should the fact that about €64bn worth of investment grade bonds are set to have matured by the end of the month. I think it rather unlikely that we’ll see enough supply to offset the bonds that are maturing. J.P. Morgan recently publishing a research piece pointing out that gross European investment grade issuance has only ever been higher than €64bn a month on four occasions in the past, and all were prior to 2008.

J.P. Morgan also point out that January has been on average the month when most issuance takes place throughout the year. The primary market has been true to form since 2014 began but it will need to maintain the pace of the roughly €16bn that was issued in the first week of the year to give investors with maturing bonds somewhere to put their cash.

If net issuance turns out to be negative in January it will be a key technical support that could see Euro investment grade spreads continue to tighten further. It will also give us all another nice data point to talk about come next January.