Changes in Corporate Bonds, Part 1

This column was originally published on RealMoney. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers.

Two changes have taken place in the corporate bond market in recent years. The first change deals with credit default swaps, which I'll discuss in today's column. In Part 2 I'll talk about how corporate bonds are analyzed differently now.

Surviving the Loss of a Major Class of Investor

There used to be a tendency for Wall Street to hold a supply of corporate bonds to sell to the buy side. That changed when credit default swaps were, or CDS, developed. A credit default swap is a transaction where one party buys protection against the default of a corporate credit from another party. The party selling protection receives a constant payment over the life of the transaction so long as the corporate credit does not default.

These swaps were developed in the mid-1990s, but they remained somewhat tangential to investment banks until the negative side of the credit cycle hit in 2000-2002. Many banks did a huge business in CDS, but they traded cash bonds and CDS separately. Typically, the cash bond side of the house was net long corporate bonds, and the CDS side was typically flat credit risk. From late 2001 through 2002, a major change rippled through the "bulge bracket" firms on Wall Street. They got the bright idea to trade cash bonds and CDS together as a group. This had several desirable outcomes: ...