10 Comments
Mar 24Liked by Shreedhar Manek

"A minor discount on the buying price makes a significant difference in yield. A ₹1,000 bond at 9% interest bought at ₹994 would have an effective interest rate of 9.05%." - 5 bps in govt bond may be significant but not in private corporate bonds in India. Regular bond investors who shop in the secondary market seek far higher yields.

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Mar 24Liked by Shreedhar Manek

"A minor discount on the buying price makes a significant difference in yield. A ₹1,000 bond at 9% interest bought at ₹994 would have an effective interest rate of 9.05%." - 5 bps in govt bond may be significant but not in private corporate bonds in India. Regular bond investors who shop in the secondary market seek far higher yields.

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author

Yes that probably explains why JM Financial couldn't sell off all the bonds that they bought. The ones that they did sell were in all likelihood pre-decided. They were not truly sold in the secondary market even though that's when the trade happened.

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Mar 24Liked by Shreedhar Manek

And this entire thing is not an isolated instance. The i-banker makes an overall loss-gain assessment i.e. + gain from fee as the issue manager less loss from discounted open market sale. If sale at a discount is noticed on the listing day and around then it's anyone's guess what's happening and why. I wonder and pity at the data intelligence of concerned monitors a) on the quality and b) on the time they take. Nevertheless it is a welcome change that at least they are not sleeping.

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Mar 23Liked by Shreedhar Manek

Most insightful !! Thanks, please keep writing :)

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Mar 23Liked by Shreedhar Manek

Don't quote the guy who said not to quote him.

:p

Btw, is it actually worth it for SEBI to ask a firm to stop issuing bonds based on this? Won't SAT allow this if in reality there's no loss ?

Also, what should be the "fraud appetite" ? I mean certainly some frauds can be ignored, say someone did all this and were only able to make 10 Rs, do we want to go after them ? I say we can create memes and publically shame them, not for fraud, but for incompetent fraud.

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Some of these facts seem incorrect. What I understand is that bankers collectively decide the price and any one bank alone cannot decide.

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author

Which facts are you referring to?

Are you referring to the original price? Yes of course the other merchant banks leading the debt offering have a say to. But, ultimately, it's not the banks which decides the price. It's the issuer. The issuer pays the banks and the banks typically would be happy to dance to its tunes. (One could argue it's just good customer service.)

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"These bonds needed at least ₹10 lakh per investor." is incorrect.

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author

Thanks Vikram, I've added a correction at the end.

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