NEWSLETTER of October 2, 2026

The following content has been added at finexpert:

Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME)
DLT & THE FUTURE OF CORPORATE TREASURY AND FINANCING
DLT and tokenisation are moving from capital-markets experimentation into practical applications for corporate treasury, funding and working-capital management. Shared ledgers, tokenised cash and programmable assets can accelerate cross-border payments, improve cash visibility and make collateral and intraday liquidity easier to mobilise. The report also identifies applications in trade and invoice finance as well as in the issuance and servicing of bonds, private credit and equity instruments. AFME recommends that treasury teams begin with high-friction use cases and develop the governance, wallet infrastructure, data integration and risk controls required for scalable adoption. >more

PwC Germany
EMISSIONSMARKT DEUTSCHLAND – Q3 2026
Germany's primary market remained open in the third quarter of 2026, although activity was dominated by relatively small transactions. Two companies completed Frankfurt listings and raised a combined EUR 113.2 million, bringing IPO proceeds for the first nine months to EUR 806 million. Five listed companies raised a further EUR 220 million through capital increases, substantially below the exceptional EUR 2.86 billion recorded in the second quarter. PwC concludes that well-prepared issuers can still access capital despite weak economic signals, but the market continues to lack large, confidence-building transactions. >more

Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME)
EUROPEAN HIGH YIELD, LEVERAGED LOAN, AND PRIVATE CREDIT REPORT Q2 2026
European leveraged debt proceeds reached EUR 167 billion in Q2 2026, up 10.8% quarter-on-quarter but 3% below the prior-year level. High-yield bond issuance more than doubled to EUR 50.4 billion, while leveraged-loan origination reached EUR 96.1 billion and direct lending declined sharply to EUR 20.5 billion. Refinancing accounted for 60% of high-yield issuance and 71% of leveraged loans, underlining the limited contribution of new-money transactions. Credit indicators remained mixed, with reported default rates differing across agencies and euro-denominated private-credit origination yields rising to 8.4% by the end of June. >more

European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA)
TRV RISK MONITOR NO. 2, 2026
EU financial markets remained resilient in the first half of 2026, but ESMA rates market, contagion and operational risks at the highest level and credit risk as high. Geopolitical tensions, energy-driven inflation and rising bond yields have increased financing costs and renewed concerns about corporate credit quality and sovereign debt sustainability. Elevated technology valuations and the growing exposure of European investors to US equities raise the risk of abrupt market corrections, while cyber threats and frontier AI add operational vulnerabilities. ESMA advises both retail and institutional investors to maintain robust liquidity buffers and highlights persistent transparency and valuation concerns in private credit. >more

CORRELATION NEGLECT IN ASSET PRICES
Hongye Guo and Jessica A. Wachter
2026
We document a strong negative serial correlation between stock market returns in i) the second month of a quarter and ii) the first month of the subsequent quarter. This pattern arises as investors fail to fully recognize the predictably repetitive aggregate earnings “news” conveyed by the late earnings announcements in the second month of a quarter. The neglected correlation leads to overreaction, which is in turn corrected when earnings of a new quarter are announced. Consistent with this hypothesis, returns in the second month of a quarter positively correlate with those of the preceding month, and the return pattern amplifies when earnings announced in these two months are more similar. Survey data and industry-level returns lend further support to this mechanism. These results provide evidence of correlation neglect even among sophisticated, financially incentivized decision-makers, underscoring its importance as a behavioral phenomenon. >more

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND FINANCIAL MARKETS
Álvaro Cartea, Jean-Edouard Colliard, Thierry Foucault, Peter Hoffmann, Rob Graumans, and Jean-David Sigaux
2026
Artificial intelligence is transforming financial markets by enabling investors and intermediaries to extract more information from increasingly abundant data through advances in algorithms and computing power. We discuss how AI changes information production and decision-making, labor demand, and financial intermediation, with a particular emphasis on securities markets. We then survey the implications of this transformation for market efficiency, competition, informational frictions, and financial stability. >more