CLO Research

With loan prices recovering to levels close to those seen before Liberation Day tariffs, a sizable equity BWIC list finally emerged last week after the April payment dates. It featured many high-quality equity tranches managed by top-tier managers such as Oak Hill Advisors, UBS AM, and CIFC.

This article highlights the softer CLO equity bids since late 2024/early 2025 and notes that not all resets are accretive.

Please see the table in this article for a list of EU CLO managers and the trends in their average percentiles since 28 March 2025.

Last Thursday (24 April 2025) saw 27 tranches of EU CLO AA bonds, with a total notional of €61.5 million, traded via BWIC. The table below provides colour on some of the AA bonds with top-tier prints. Based on these covers and a simple extrapolation, the term structure of EU AA bonds would appear as shown in the second table.

The table below presents the annualised (orig) prepayment rates for seasoned EU CLO deals with reinvestment periods (RP) ending in 2022 across the first, second, third, and fourth years post-RP. Typically, deals experience a single-digit prepayment rate in the first year post-RP. The median post-RP prepayment rate increased to 21.3%, although the range of post-RP prepayment rates is wide.

Around 34% of single-B tranches from the 2012–2022 vintages had an MVOC below 100% even before the recent volatility triggered by the Liberation Day tariffs. As of 24 April 2025, that figure has risen to 40%, or 151 deals across 49 managers, as shown in the table below.

The single-B tranche is a useful way to increase the leverage of US BSL CLO deals and reduce the amount...

While the Morningstar LSTA US B/BB Ratings Loan Index has recovered to just below 97 today—after hitting a low of...