The European Central Bank (ECB) announced on March 10 a package of measures to further increase the accommodative stance of monetary policy in the eurozone. Aside from the widely expected moves on interest rates, the ECB also increased the amount of the monthly asset purchases from €60 billion to €80 billion. More importantly, aside from government bonds, the QE programme will now also include bonds issued by non-bank eurozone corporations with an investment grade rating. The ultimate aim is to bring down financing costs for non-financial eurozone corporations in order to encourage investment growth in the real economy.
The full technical details of this newly-extended QE programme are not yet available, but we know that the purchases of non-bank corporate bonds will commence towards the end of the second quarter of 2016 and that the QE programme will remain in place until at least March 2017, or beyond, if necessary.
Since its introduction, the ECB’s QE programme has provided solid support to eurozone government bond valuations. It may now do the same for non-bank corporate debt. This creates a tactical investment opportunity, albeit one where investors should focus on short-to-medium-term bond capital appreciation rather than yield income.
ETFs to Tap into Eurozone Non-Financial Corporate Debt
Low-cost exchange-traded-funds (ETFs), with their wide choice of sliced market exposures across all asset classes, are particularly apt to roll out this kind of tactical bets. There are plenty of ETFs providing exposure to the euro-denominated corporate bond market, and some of them track indices that exclude non-financial issuers.
At this moment, measured in terms of assets under management, iShares is the clear market-leader for this particular exposure. The iShares Euro Corporate Bond ex-Financials ETF (IEXF) would be for investors favouring an all-maturity approach and the iShares Europe Corporate Bond ex-Financials 1-5y ETF (IEX5) for investors wanting to target their position to the short-to-medium-dated segment of the maturity spectrum.
These iShares ETFs are physically replicated and come with an ongoing charge of 0.20%. It must be noted that they track Barclays broad-based corporate bond benchmarks which measure the performance of euro-denominated non-financial bonds irrespective of the country of domicile of the issuer. This means that one gains exposure to both eurozone and non-eurozone-domiciled corporates in a rough proportion of 70/30. However, this may not be a problem in an environment where the ECB provides overall support to the market.