The European Investment Bank took top honours with a €3bn 1.125% 15 year that was printed on May 9, taking advantage of a rally in OATs after Emmanuel Macron was elected president of the French Republic on May 7. One banker off the deal described EIB’s effort as a “blockbuster”.
The bond achieved a weighted average GC BondMarker score of 9.3 over the five categories available for voting (pricing, structure/maturity, quality of the investor book, timing, and performance).
The book grew to more than €9bn, enabling the leads — Deutsche Bank, NatWest Markets, Société Générale and UniCredit — to tighten pricing by 3bp to a final level of 6bp through mid-swaps.
“We were waiting for the election result,” the issuer told GlobalCapital at the time. “French public debt had been impacted severely by the run-up to the election but, since the first round, OATs have outperformed significantly, tightening against Bunds. This put EIB’s spread in secondaries closer to the OATs, which helps with the attractiveness of our paper.”
EIB is no stranger to top marks on GC BondMarker. It also printed the top-scoring bond of the first quarter — a €5bn 0.25% October 2024 (see previous coverage).
However, not every issuer that brought a deal in the buoyant euro market conditions following the French election results could be assured of success. A euro benchmark that came just two days after EIB’s clocked one of the lower scores of the quarter.
Rentenbank brought a €1bn 0.625% May 2027 euro benchmark via BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs on May 11 that scored a weighted average mark of 5.7 on GC BondMarker. Voters were critical in the performance and quality of the investor distribution categories. But the deal achieved decent scores for timing and structure/maturity.
In the second quarter of 2017, GlobalCapital collected votes on 24 benchmarks. We have not printed scores on all benchmarks — some have been excluded because they did not receive enough votes.
With GC BondMarker, we aim to provide a quantitative complement to our industry-leading bond comments by crowd-sourcing market participants’ opinions.
We ask participants to award deals a score out of 10 over the five categories. A deal that the voter considered very poor would merit a score close to zero and one they considered very impressive print close to 10.
We calculate the average total score for each deal by taking the weighted mean of individual votes over the five categories — with each category taking equal weight.
Deals are live for voting for one week after pricing and the results are collated and published at the end of that period.
Next week: read about how issuers in the dollar market fared in the eyes of GC BondMarker voters.
