How ProÞtable Is Capital Structure Arbitrage? Fan Yu1 University of California, Irvine First Draft: September 30, 2004 This Version: June 3, 2005 1I am grateful to Yong Rin Park for excellent research assistance, and Vineer Bhansali, Jef- ferson Duarte, Darrell DufÞe, Robert Jarrow, Haitao Li, Francis Longstaff, Donald Smith, Stuart Turnbull, and seminar/conference participants at Boston University, California State University- Fullerton, Cornell University (ORIE), PIMCO, University of California-Irvine, University of Washington, and the 15th Derivative Securities Conference at the FDIC for comments. I would especially like to thank Philippe Jorion for drawing my attention to this facscinating topic and Gary Zhu for educating me on the credit default swaps market. Address correspondence to Fan Yu, The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-3125, E-mail:
[email protected]. How ProÞtable Is Capital Structure Arbitrage? Abstract This paper examines the risk and return of the so-called “capital structure arbitrage,” which exploits the mispricing between a company’s debt and equity. SpeciÞcally, a structural model connects a company’s equity price with its credit default swap (CDS) spread. Based on the deviation of CDS market spreads from their theoretical counterparts, a convergence-type trading strategy is proposed and analyzed using 135,759 daily CDS spreads on 261 obligors. At the level of indi- vidual trades, the risk of the strategy arises when the arbitrageur shorts CDS and the market spread subsequently skyrockets, forcing the arbitrageur into early liq- uidation and engendering large losses. An equally-weighted portfolio of all trades produces Sharpe ratios similar to those of other Þxed-income arbitrage strategies and hedge fund industry benchmarks.