How Profitable Is Capital Structure Arbitrage?

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. Specifically, a structural model provides a connection between a company’s equity price and its credit default swap (CDS) spread. Based on the deviation of CDS market quotes from their theoretical counterparts, a convergence-type trading strategy is proposed and analyzed using 4,044 daily CDS spreads on 33 obligors. We find that capital structure arbitrage can be an attractive investment strategy, but is not without its risk. In particular, the risk arises when the arbitrageur shorts CDS and the market spread subsequently skyrockets, resulting in market closure and forcing the arbitrageur to liquidate. We present preliminary evidence that the monthly return from capital structure arbitrage is related to the corporate bond market return and a return index on fixed income arbitrage.