Re: Interesting Bond issues
“We are seeing growing retail investor interest in fixed-income products, for example, plain vanilla corporate bonds,” Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore said at a press conference last week.
At the moment, the public can buy retail bonds listed on the Singapore stock exchange or bonds sold in a specified retail offering. But public offerings are costly and time-consuming to execute, as they involve preparing a separate prospectus, so few of these bonds exist.
Retail investors have also traditionally preferred stocks. However, this is starting to change with the appearance of corporate bonds with yields of 4% to 5% for two-year or three-year terms. Those yields are far more attractive than fixed deposit bank rates of near zero or two-year Singapore government bonds, for example, which are yielded only 0.4% on average in 2014.
MAS’s goal is to improve transparency so retail investors can easily understand how the securities work. The central bank will also examine how disclosure requirements can be streamlined to satisfy certain criteria, such as issue size or the track record of the issuer, to increase the range of issues that are eligible for retail participation.
Should MAS introduce a new framework for retail bonds, one of the first retail issuers is likely to be Temasek Holdings , the government fund, which has eyed a retail bond for some time.
http://www.ifrasia.com/singapore-in-retail-bond-push/21157142.article
“We are seeing growing retail investor interest in fixed-income products, for example, plain vanilla corporate bonds,” Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore said at a press conference last week.
At the moment, the public can buy retail bonds listed on the Singapore stock exchange or bonds sold in a specified retail offering. But public offerings are costly and time-consuming to execute, as they involve preparing a separate prospectus, so few of these bonds exist.
Retail investors have also traditionally preferred stocks. However, this is starting to change with the appearance of corporate bonds with yields of 4% to 5% for two-year or three-year terms. Those yields are far more attractive than fixed deposit bank rates of near zero or two-year Singapore government bonds, for example, which are yielded only 0.4% on average in 2014.
MAS’s goal is to improve transparency so retail investors can easily understand how the securities work. The central bank will also examine how disclosure requirements can be streamlined to satisfy certain criteria, such as issue size or the track record of the issuer, to increase the range of issues that are eligible for retail participation.
Should MAS introduce a new framework for retail bonds, one of the first retail issuers is likely to be Temasek Holdings , the government fund, which has eyed a retail bond for some time.
http://www.ifrasia.com/singapore-in-retail-bond-push/21157142.article
