Some high-yield bonds are now trading below 0% on the secondary market.

The activist fund uses equity swaps to acquire a stake in the engineering and technology consulting firm, which is under a takeover bid.

Fitch Ratings’ analysis of Europe’s five largest UCITS high-yield bond funds, with combined assets of €43bn at the end of March 2019, revealed that all these funds offer daily liquidity but their holdings of highly liquid securities were limited, indicating significant liquidity risk. On average, only 4% of their investments were in cash and only 14% in instruments rated ‘A’ or above, with ‘AAA’ instruments having the lowest allocation.

Weak investor appetite has thrown a spanner into Anheuser-Busch InBev’s IPO, touted to be the biggest IPO of the year, as the company has announced that it will not be going ahead with the proceedings.

Italy pulled off a couple of robust 50- and 10-year issuances on 9 and 10 July with foreign investors.

ICBC Financial Leasing was the chosen one.

Swiss Re has suspended its initial public offering (IPO) plans for the British life insurer ReAssure, due to heightened caution and weak underlying demand in the UK primary market from large institutional investors.