Municipal securities trading picks up to near 2013 peak levels: MSRB

By Susanna Moon

Chicago, Aug. 3 – The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board said municipal securities trading had “bounced back to the highest levels since the third quarter of 2013,” at par amount of $818.2 billion for the second quarter.

The trading volume for the second quarter rose 10.4% from the $741.4 billion recorded in the second quarter of 2015, compared with the peak of $825.4 billion traded in the third quarter of 2013, according to a company announcement.

The total number of trades fell to 2.34 million in the second quarter, slipping 8.4% from 2.56 million trades in the same quarter of 2015.

The most actively traded municipal securities was a tobacco settlement asset-backed bond issued by the Golden State Tobacco Securitization Corp. with $4.7 billion of par trades. Meanwhile, a hospital revenue refunding bond from the West Virginia Hospital Finance Authority saw the most activity with 1,464 trades.

MSRB said that customer buying grew to an average daily par amount of $6.44 billion in the second quarter, compared with $5.96 billion for the same period the previous year. The average daily number of trades of customer purchases was 14,484, compared with 17,009 trades the previous year.

There was a daily average of $381 million, or 5.9% of customer purchases of trades of $100,000 or less, in the second quarter, compared with $450 million, or 7.5% of all customer purchases, in the year-ago second quarter.

As for rate resets, the number for variable-rate demand obligations dropped to 120,725 from 135,504 the previous year-ago period.

There were 2,190 auction-rate securities rate resets in the second quarter, compared with 2,285 resets in the same quarter of 2015.

The regulatory board recorded municipal market disclosure documents of 39,781 in the second quarter, compared with 42,088 documents for the same period of 2015.

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