...Quarterly Market Monitor and Forecast Summary Stellar High Yield: High yield grew at a particularly strong pace in 2014, with issuance briefly overtaking US high yield for the first time in 1H14 and going on to achieve 40% year-on-year growth in 10M14 ¡ with a steadily rising share attributable to M&A. Overall, corporate issuance declined 6% year on year in 10M14, but levels of pre-funding remained strong with new supply exceeding year-to-date maturities by 1.8x. Corporates have been keen to capitalise on record low bond yields by issuing opportunistically, in addition to refinancing more costly legacy debt. Positive Rating Bias Persists: The market upgrade-to-downgrade ratio remained positive in the year through October after moving out of negative territory in 2Q14, for the first time since the crisis. The volume of bonds experiencing upgrades exceeded those subject to downgrades by 1.2x in 10M14 ¡ a considerable improvement from 2013, when the rate was 0.3x. Collapsing downgrade volume...
