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And to sell their bonds, a handful of issuers including Scientific Games International Inc. have had to pay higher yields this month than dealers had expected. Risk premiums, or spreads, for CCC debt are still about 2.4 percentage points wider than they were in early October, when high-yield debt started struggling. "It doesn't look like that unhealthy of a high-yield market", said Elaine Stokes, a portfolio manager at Loomis Sayles & Co. "It's not at that level where it looks cheap, but as an asset class, it's good yield". [Extracted from the article]

Michael A. Snyder, a managing director at MacKay Shields LLC who previously ran the global high-yield investment group at AllianceBernstein, has died. Snyder was a New York-based senior portfolio manager for the high-yield unit at MacKay Shields where he helped manage more than $23 billion in leveraged loan investments and high-yield bonds, according to his LinkedIn profile. [Extracted from the article]

Community Health Systems Inc. paid up to sell bonds to refinance an upcoming term loan maturity as the hospital operator seeks to tame its $13 billion debt load. "The company will generate little if any free cash flow over the next several years and will not be able to reduce debt at a faster pace than asset sales allow", KDP Asset Management analyst Barbara Cappaert said in a Feb. 21 note. [Extracted from the article]

Spread on most actively-traded debt widens 18 basis points The risk premium on one of the company's most-traded bonds, the 3 percent notes due 2026, widened 18 basis points, or 0.18 percentage point, to 163 basis points over Treasuries, according to Trace bond price data. [Extracted from the article]

CEO has stressed share repurchases as main priority, not M&A The buybacks are "a negative development for the credit story at this point", CreditSights analysts led by Ashwin Tiruvasu, who rate XPO bonds as underperform, said in a note earlier on Tuesday. [Extracted from the article]

Bike crash victims may look up from the asphalt to see a paramedic arriving in an electric three wheeler unveiled Friday by micro-cap company Arcimoto Inc. One day later, shares of Eugene, Oregon-based Arcimoto spiked 109 percent, a move that coincided with a Bloomberg video about Arcimoto and Frohnmayer. [Extracted from the article]

Real estate investment trusts are reacting to the news that Amazon.com Inc. is pulling out of its plan to build a headquarters in New York City after backlash from some residents and politicians. AttributionSebastian Silva: editor primaryWill Daley: editor secondarySebastian Pellejero: by reporterCourtney Dentch: editor responsible. [Extracted from the article]

As the video game model evolves, Morgan Stanley expects the market to pay less for publishers until they develop a better sense of what works. During the conference call, Chief Operating Officer Collister Johnson said that as the company increasingly brings Activision and Blizzard IP to the mobile space, investors will see the game publisher deploy more free-to-play models. Morgan Stanley's Nowak said publishers should strive to invest and experiment across all models, platforms and screens. [Extracted from the article]

UBS survey shows more respondents are positive on trade impact BofA sees "upside" as many firms already baked in tariff hike The survey broke down the firms into four categories by sales and found that bigger companies were more optimistic on the impact of tariffs than smaller ones. [Extracted from the article]

Legislation aimed at restricting share buybacks would likely contribute to a record string of leveraged buyouts if enacted, Canaccord Genuity says. The Canaccord note comes as the debate surrounding share buybacks has emerged again following a New York Times op-ed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Bernie Sanders on Feb. 4 that called out the practice. Reynolds says the Schumer-Sanders measure has little chance of being enacted for at least a few years and, if it came, would result in the unintended consequences of still more "shadow banking". [Extracted from the article]

Electronic Arts Soars as Apex Lauded "Hottest Game in Years" (1) Electronic Arts Inc. rose to the highest in nearly four months as some Wall Street analysts weighed in favorably on the the potential success of the company's latest game, Apex Legends. And Jefferies said Fortnite's viewership on the video game streaming site Twitch was "basically chopped in half" in the days following the Apex release. [Extracted from the article]

The former hedge fund manager announced Friday that he's launching Empire Financial Research with "old friend" Porter Stansberry and Stansberry Research. Tilson closed his hedge fund, Kase Capital Management, in 2017 after reporting "sustained underperformance" to investors. [Extracted from the article]

Who Will Wear the Cannabis Crown? "We believe successful brands can emerge in the US, likely built on product differentiation, but in early stages of a new industry, it can be hard to identify long-term winners, " analyst Michael Lavery wrote in a note to clients. In the cannabis sector, Lavery estimates that the seven largest publicly traded U.S. cannabis operators captured six percent of market share at most in 2018, leaving space for Canadian companies to enter post-prohibition. [Extracted from the article]

There's no shortage of warning signs for the housing market, but Bank of America says investors shouldn't fear the worst. "Don't believe the narratives of a housing collapse", economist Michelle Meyer wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. [Extracted from the article]