I last looked at the most active trading names in CDS and TRS in January 2023, so today I will update that for April 2023 data. This data is from U.S. SEC Securities Based Swap Data Repositorys (SBSDRs).
CDS on Sovereigns
Using SBSDRView, we can find the most active sovereigns for Credit Derivatives trades in April 2023.
- Showing the name, gross notional in millions of usd, trade count and rank in April (with rank change from prior month).
- We could rank by notional but for CDS we prefer to use trade count as with $5million as the maximum disclosed notional for a single trade, we know from the data that this total gross notional is significantly understated, particularly for Sovereigns and less so for Corporates.
- Mexico the most active name with 462 trades and top in March too
- Columbia in second, up 3 places, with 302 trades
- Brazil in third with 221 trades
- Egypt the largest mover, up 5 places with 114 trades
- Saudi Arabia, the largest faller, down 5 places with 40 trades.
The above list was a selection for USD trades only.
If we now look at EUR, we see something very interesting.
- 9 trades on USA!
- I did not expect to see any, while Italy is there each month with a handful of trades.
- After all the USA is the best credit there is in Capital markets, so why would anyone buy protection?
- Persumably these trades are driven by the US Debt ceiling stand-off.
- (All the trades were late in April and all above the disclosed cap size of $5million)
- One to watch as the Biden Administration and Congress discussions continue
- In May 2023 so far, there are a further 13 trades, again each above $5million
CDS on US Corporates
Next the twenty most active US corporates by trade count for April 2023.
- Bristol Myers Squib heading the list with 135 trades and up 105 places.
- Dish DBS Corporation in second, same as prior month
- American Airlines, regularily one of the top names, is in third
- Comcast Corporation, the largest mover, up 62 places in fourth
- Prudential Financial Inc, up 36 places, Lowe’s up 32 and NextEra Energy up 20
- While most other names have a similar rank to the prior month
CDS on EU Corporates
Next let’s look at the most active EU Corporates.
- Sweeping changes in rank from the prior monnth
- Only Deutsche Bank and Casino, in the top 20 in both April and March
- Car companies to the fore with VW, Renault, Stellantis the top 3, each with > 150 trades
- Mercedes, Jaguar BMW in 6, 7 and 8th position
- Pernod Ricard the largest mover, up 167 places
- Sudedzucker and LVMH not far behind, up 165 and 150 places respectively
- Credit Suisse, not shown is in 21st, with 99 trades, down from first rank and 433 trades in March
TRS on US Equities
Let’s turn now to Equity markets and Total Return Swaps on US Stocks in April 2023 and rank by gross notional, as unlike CDS a far smaller portion of trades have capped notionals, with only trades > $250 million size being capped.
- Tesla in top spot with $1.9 billion and 261 trades, up 15 places from March volumes
- Apple in second with $1.57 billion from 273 trades
- Mastercard in third with $1.38 billion from 72 trades, is up 176 places
- Nvidia in fourth with $1.3 billion from 213 trades is up 30 places
- Activision Blizzard, the second largest mover, is up 209 places with $730 million and in the news again today with the EU Comission clearing its acquistion by Microsoft, subjct to conditions, unlike the April announcement that the UK CMA would block the deal.
- Thermo Fisher Scientific the largest mover, is up 474 places with $610 million and 93 trades, many of these on or after the April 26th quarterly results announcement with weak sales in it’s life sciences unit
- Berkshire Hathaway is up 51 places with $515 million
- Sanofi Aventis ADR is up 140 places with $550 million
- Newmont, the mining company, up 181 places with $440 million and 205 trades, is in the process of bidding for Australia’s Newcrest Mining.
TRS on EU Equities
As in my January blog, I wanted to look at EUR names next.
Unfortunately doing so shows that TotalEnergies has $44 bilion from 2,079 trades! And this huge voluem is caused by $43 billion on 12 April. Similarily exceedingly high volumes were showing for ING Groep, Nordex, Hermes and Air France, all on 28 April.
Drilling down on the trades reported on the questionable high volume dates, show a large number of duplicate correction transactions to original trades, as opposed to a subsequent correction transation correcting a prior corrstion transaction. This resulted in duplicate transactions grossly inflating the volume. We will need to investigate why this happened and work out how to fix.
The same issue exists in UK, and JPY names, so I will skip those for today too.
TRS on AUD Equities
Before we end, lets’s also take a look at AUD.
In Summary
- There is a lot of data available from the US SEC SBSDRs.
- SBSDRView provides new transparency on OTC Derivatives in Credit & Equity
- Our Most Active view highlights the names that trade most frequently each day/week/month
- Providing new information and insights
- Please contact us, if you are interested in using SBSDRView.