US corporate bond spreads held steady on Friday during a holiday-shortened session, while home builders' credit spreads widened a little on surprisingly weak figures on existing home sales.
Trading of cash investment-grade corporate bonds was fairly thin, with the US bond markets scheduled to close at 2 pm on Friday and all of Monday in observance of Memorial Day. Credit default swap spreads edged slightly tighter in tandem with strength in US stocks, analysts said.
Spreads of US home builders "leaked just a little tiny bit wider" on a report showing an unexpected decline in US existing home sales in April, said Ira Jersey, US credit strategist at Credit Suisse in New York.
The data from the National Association of Realtors, which showed that existing home sales in April were at their lowest since June 2003, rekindled worries that a downturn in the US housing sector may have more room to run.
The cost to protect the bonds of builder Centex Corp from default rose about 2 basis points, which means it now costs $2000 more annually to insure $10 million of debt for five years, according to Jersey.
Centex's bonds were not traded in significant size on Friday, according to MarketAxess. A move by Standard & Poor's late on Thursday to change its rating outlook on six homebuilders to negative from stable had little impact on builders' spreads. "A lot of that was baked into the market," Jersey said. "You basically had some stabilisation in homebuilders' credit spreads after a very, very strong rally."
Issuance of high-grade and cross-over corporate bonds totalled about $28 billion this week, which is substantial, Jersey said. Still, demand for new corporate debt remains strong, he said. "There probably is some limit to demand, but we know that it's a pretty high limit, just based on the fact that you have a lot of yield-hungry investors who are looking for spread product," he said.
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