本帖最后由 何鸿燊 于 2010-2-3 23:15 编辑
Chart of Day
Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will find it tough to reproduce last year’s record trading revenue as the difference between bid and offer prices in credit markets narrows to the tightest in almost 18 months.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows how the gap between prices at which traders offer to buy and sell credit-default swaps on North American companies has shrunk to 6.1 basis points, from as high as 20.4 in October 2008 and 16.3 in March. Historically wide spreads on everything from derivatives to bonds, representing fees earned per trade, helped fuel the recovery in bank earnings.
“It’s much tougher to earn those” profits now, said Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist at Mesirow Financial Inc. in Chicago. “The more efficient the market is, the narrower the spread is supposed to be.”
Goldman Sachs’s revenue from fixed-income, currencies and commodities trading surged to $23.3 billion in 2009, while JPMorgan posted fixed-income markets revenue of $17.6 billion. The return to pre-crisis spreads may reduce the industry’s profitability at the same time regulators are threatening to curb risk taking.
Justin Perras, a spokesman for JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally, both in New York, declined to comment.
Bid-ask spreads on the 125 companies that are part of the Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index Series 13, a benchmark for the credit-default swaps market, averaged 6.3 basis points this year, compared with 10.4 in all of 2009 and 9.7 in 2008, CMA data show. The spread averaged 4.2 basis points in 2007. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
Credit-default swaps are derivatives, contracts with values derived from assets or events, including stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, interest rates or the weather. Banks, hedge funds and insurance companies use the swaps to insure bonds and loans against default or to speculate on the creditworthiness of countries and companies.
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