Bear Stearns High Yield Index finishes week to Nov. 16 with 9.99% year-to-date return

By Angela McDaniels

Seattle, Nov. 17 - The Bear Stearns High Yield Index's return fell to 9.99% for the year to Nov. 16 from 10.87% a week earlier.

For the month to Nov. 16, the index return increased to 1.23% from 0.75% a week earlier.

During the most recent week, the yield to worst tightened by 6 basis points to 8.01% and the yield-to-worst spread narrowed by 11 bps to 330 bps.

For the month to Nov. 16, all 12 index industry sectors showed positive returns.

The outperformer for the month, thus far, is the health care sector with a 2.32% return. Its hospital management subsector lead the advance with a 3.83% return for the month to Nov. 16 and had the best return among the subsectors for the month.

Despite health care's advance, which boosted its year-to-date return to 2.72%, the sector continues to hold the index's lowest return for the year so far.

Health care continues to be weighed down by its diagnostic services component, which had the index's lowest month-to-date and year-to-date returns among the subsectors at negative 0.82% and negative 16.40%, respectively.

Transportation was the underperformer among the sectors for the month to Nov. 17 with a 0.23% return.

However, transportation's 9.96% year-to-date return is fourth best among the 12 industry sectors, and the 33.67% year-to-date return of its airlines component leads all other subsectors for 2006 to Nov. 17.

The outperformer for the year to date is the consumer cyclical sector with a 14.09% return through Nov. 17, followed by media with an 11.40% return and telecommunication with a 10.35% return.

Consumer cyclical gained a boost from its automobile manufacturing-related component, which, with a year-to-date return of 21.20%, trails only the 21.91% return of telecommunication's long distance component and the above-mentioned airlines subsectors' 33.67% return.

Automobile manufacturing-related makes up 14.14% of the index composite, long distance makes up 1.19% and airlines represents 0.08%.

At Nov. 16, the index had a market value of $590.40 billion, and the issue count stood at 1,650.

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