What is Primary Market Monitor?

Primary Market Monitor is GlobalCapital’s tool for analysing syndicated benchmark bond issuance from SSA, FIG, corporate, emerging market and covered bond issuers.

We record the key details of each public benchmark in these markets, as well as link to our editorial coverage, allowing subscribers to filter the data to analyse results to suit their needs — be that working on deal pitches, or assessing where their own new issues might be priced.

Not only does PMM cover all the key information around each deal, such as size, lead managers, order book size and reoffer spread, but it also captures information around how it was executed. We record how big the order book was in relation to the deal size, how much the issuer and its syndicate tightened pricing during execution and, where available, the new issue premium the issuer paid.

What data goes in the PMM from each market?

To qualify for inclusion, deals can be new issues or taps of old bonds, but in all cases they must have more than one bookrunner and be of benchmark size, which will vary from market to market. Minimum sizes for consideration as a benchmark are as follows:

SSA

$500m

€500m

£250m

Corporates

€500m

£250m

Dollar deals not included.

Investment grade only, and hybrid capital. High yield deals (rated under BBB-) not included.

FIG

€500m

£250m

Dollar deals not included.

Exceptions to the requirement for deals to be syndicated can be made for self-led public benchmarks by major banks, and to the minimum size requirements for smaller issuers' public deals at the discretion of GlobalCapital.

Covered Bonds

$500m

€500m

£250m

Emerging Markets

$300m or €300m for corporate and bank issuers

$500m or €500m for sovereign issuers

Sterling issuance considered on a case-by-case basis

New issue premiums

Where possible and appropriate we record what market participants on the deal calculate a bond’s new issue premium (NIP) to be. We also ask market participants away from the deal where they saw the NIP. We record these separately, taking an average of the estimates from different participants in each category. We then take an average of these scores to provide the GC NIP.

For example, if one lead manager says the NIP was 5bp and another says it was 7bp, the PMM data will show the New Issue Premium on the Deal as 6bp.

If a bank off the deal tells us it was 8bp and an investor tells us it was 10bp, we would record the New Issue Premium Away as 9bp.

The GC New Issue Premium would therefore be 7.5bp

League Tables

Every deal in the Primary Market Monitor database, and only those deals, are eligible for inclusion in our league tables.

For what is eligible for inclusion in the database, please see above.

The calculation of league table credit is simply the principal amount of the bond shared equally between the bookrunners. We do not consider co-lead roles or similar for league table credit..