Turkish banks and senior unsecured trades go together like falafel and houmous, but investor appetite has been growing throughout the year for more exotic fare and bond bankers say this is just the beginning. Turkey’s banking sector kicked off 2016 in the most vanilla way possible – with a US$500m five-year EMBI Global index-eligible senior deal from state-guaranteed TurkExim on February 1. But it was not long before more esoteric fare began emerging from the country’s banking sector, with parti

Emerging markets are notoriously volatile, yet even among its peers, Turkey stands out for its wild fluctuations of performance, typically driven by global risk sentiment. An open and liquid market, investors can get in and out of the Turkish market very easily, encouraging these swings in performance. With an average daily liquidity of around US$1.5bn, Borsa Istanbul is among the most liquid emerging markets exchanges, despite its meagre 1.6% weighting in the MSCI EM index meaning many EM funds

Has Turkey’s long-troubled and much-maligned economy finally turned the corner? Top-line data would seem to support that view. Output grew by a stronger-than-expected 4% in 2015, driven by strong consumer spending figures, making Turkey the fourth fastest growing economy among G20 nations. Nor does this seem to be a fluke. Economic performance has improved consistently in recent years, a fact often overlooked by investors. Output, said Marcus Svedberg, chief economist at emerging market investme

Initial public offerings require a number of criteria to both launch and price successfully, among them a stable macroeconomic and political backdrop, adequately prepared and attractive companies and both buyers and sellers willing to agree on valuation. On both the former and latter points, Turkey has fallen short,  and until May 2016 the result had been no successful flotations of any size since AvivaSA in November 2014. Aviva and Sabanci’s Turkish life and pensions joint venture raised TL330.

Despite the obvious geopolitical problems in the neighbourhood, Turkey’s PPP market has been in great shape. In fact, things have been working so well that prospects for more business are not tied solely to political issues. If anything, the market could end up being a victim of its own success, with the spectre of capacity constraints potentially impeding future activity. In 2015, the healthcare sector was at the forefront of the PPP market, thanks to a number of projects forming the initial ph

Turkey has a long-established reputation as an opportunistic issuer and it displayed its famed sense of good timing by hitting the market with two quick-fire deals that dodged the tumultuous early months of 2016 on the one hand and appeared to anticipate an oncoming political crisis on the other. The sovereign traditionally rings in the New Year with a benchmark international bond issue, but 2016 proved to be an exception to that as it sat on the sidelines for the first two months while emerging

State-owned VakifBank broke new ground with its €500m five-year covered bond towards the end of April. The best part of 10 years of wrangling over the product was wrapped up in the deal, which made it notable from an issuer point of view. As far as investors were concerned, it printed at a spread that offered considerable pick-up over anything else available in the asset class. Unlike peripheral eurozone banks, Vakif’s covered bonds are not eligible for the European Central Bank’s bond-buying pr