Baird Fixed Income Capital Markets – 2024 Year in Review
Baird’s Fixed Income Capital Markets (FICM) platform is composed of seasoned professionals focusing on Institutional Sales & Trading and Public Finance. Our Institutional Sales & Trading team delivers precise trade execution, timely analysis, and unique ideas from a team of tenured product specialists in the areas of corporate credit, government and agency, municipal, and securitized products. We continue to strategically grow our business by expanding our product expertise, service offerings, and broadening our reach in both the U.S. and the U.K. to best support the needs of our clients and institutional investors.
2024 Macroeconomic Factors
In 2024, Fixed Income Capital Markets was presented with a challenging environment. We began the year with concerns over interest rate movement and economic impacts. There was uncertainty among investors regarding action and timing related to interest rate cuts, ongoing geopolitical tensions, and election year volatility, to name a few.
During the second half of the year and in response to declining inflation and concerns over the labor market, The Federal Reserve (Fed) cut interest rates three times throughout the year for a combined 1 percent. As bond yields and prices tend to have an inverse relationship, investors began to see returns on their long-term investments and as such, more investors began entering from the sidelines given the long-term attraction.
With Donald Trump as the president-elect of the United States, the 2024 election has brought to light new implications for both public policy and the financial markets as policy shifts are imminent. Although the Republican sweep has largely been priced into the market, long-term impacts will emerge over the coming months.
As for Baird FICM, we weathered the challenges of 2024 and focused on the controllable. We've worked to build a thoughtful succession plan, naming Ross Cohn our Institutional Fixed Income Sales Manager and welcomed new leadership across two of our four product areas: Securitized Products and Corporate Credit. We are pleased that the depth of expertise and talent at Baird allows us to promote from within, allowing our multiyear strategic priorities to remain at the forefront. Furthermore, we hired exceptional talent to further broaden capabilities of our fixed income platform and expanded our public finance platform geographically to better serve our clients. In 2025, we have a continued focus on enhancing collaboration among our salesforce to increase new issue mandates, as cross-selling improves our ability to serve our clients and present new opportunities they may not otherwise consider.
Our Fixed Income Capital Markets teams made significant strides in 2024, with a few notable milestones highlighted below.
Increase in New Issue Mandates
We have made a concentrated effort to increase new issue transactions across our platform. In 2024, we participated in Corporate Credit, Municipal, and Securitized Products new issue transactions, with this year being our debut for Corporate Credit new issue. With this expansion, we implemented a transaction website page to broadly showcase, educate, and market our new issue business collectively across our platform.
We completed more than 40 Securitized Product new issue mandates, including roles of Lead Bookrunner, Co-Manager, and Placement Agent. Notable Municipal transactions include: $465,770,000 Comal Independent School District, Texas, our largest senior managed negotiated transaction to date; $201,620,000 American Leadership Academy, Arizona, achieving lowest spreads to Municipal Market Data (MMD) for a non-rated charter school bond nationwide since January 1, 2023; $102,500,000 Hamilton County Public Building Corporation, Indiana, funding an updated and larger dispatch facility to house its Emergency 911 services.
To aid in growing our new issue business, we welcomed Andrew Peisch, Managing Director, Fixed Income Capital Solutions, to serve in a new issue origination and business development role within our Securitized Products division. In this role, he will be actively working with clients to structure securitized funding, asset disposition, and synthetic risk transfer alternatives.
Growing Our Public Finance Capabilities in California
Earlier this year, we announced the expansion of our West Coast capabilities with the addition of John Baracy, Managing Director, and Manager of the newly established California Public Finance Group and California K-12 market lead. This opportunistic hire comes with a commitment to his clients and deep expertise working with California K-12 school districts which provides a significant advantage as we continue to grow our public finance platform and serve clients across the State. Looking ahead at 2025, we plan to build our California Public Finance Group by hiring additional bankers to grow other sectors in California with a focus on putting clients first.
Top Talent & Expanding Expertise
We have had another exciting year of growth, adding top talent across our platform to enhance our product expertise and services to meet the needs of our clients and institutional investors. This year, we added top talent across our sales, trading, analysts, capital solutions, public finance and underwriting teams. Our frequent hiring patterns demonstrate our ability to be agile as we strategically hire individuals that fit within the structure of our platform and embody Baird’s culture. We look forward to welcoming top talent across our industry to Baird in 2025 and beyond.
2025 is going to be an interesting and challenging year full of opportunities. I’m confident that we have the right strategy and team to tackle what comes our way. Most importantly, thank you to our clients for your ongoing commitment and trust in our team to serve your needs through various market cycles.
