Bear Stearns High Yield Index declines 0.57% in week to May 18, now up 3.39% year to date

By Paul A. Harris

St. Louis, May 19 - The Bear Stearns High Yield Index fell 0.57% in most recent week, trimming its year-to-date return to 3.39%.

The move follows the previous week's 0.38% gain.

The index has now reported gains in 67 of the past 101 weeks.

For the most recent week, the yield to worst ended wider by 13 basis points at 8.37%.

The index's yield-to-worst spread widened by 20 basis points to 338 bps.

Only one of the 11 industry sectors comprising the index made a positive move during the most recent week. The transportation sector advanced 0.11% to extend its year-to-date return to 6.17%, the best year-to-date return among all of the index industry sectors.

Leading transportation's advance was its freight-containers-shipping component, which gained 0.20% on the week, extending its year-to-date return to 4.79%.

The transportation sector's only other component, airlines, remains far and away the year-to-date outperformer among all index sub-sectors at 19.03%. However airlines, which represents only 0.08% of the index's composite, dropped by 0.57% during the week to May 18.

The technology sector, which contains no sub-sectors, suffered the week's biggest decline, dropping 0.99%, trimming its year-to-date return to 4.15%.

The index also measures the performance of five credit-rating classes: the double-B, the single-B, the triple-C, the Ba3/B1 and the non-rated classes. All five classes posted losses during the most recent week.

The non-rated component, which represents only 0.70% of the composite, suffered the deepest drop, losing 1.21% to trim its year-to-date return to 2.61%.

The next greatest loss among the credit rating sectors was that of the triple-C sector, representing 14.83% of the composite, which dropped 0.70% on the week, cutting its year-to-date return to 7.96%.

The double-B sector, representing 36.91% of the composite as the largest of the five credit rating classes, narrowly outperformed the others by virtue of a milder loss: negative 0.51% on the week. The loss cut its year-to-date return to 1.70%.

The market value of the index ended the week at $568.72 billion, down from the previous week's $574.86 billion. The number of issues decreased by four to 1,673 issues.

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