Access: Cautious trading to mark bonds market [0:00-5:00]

traders at Axis Bank say they expect the bond markets to trade cautiously as investors repositioned portfolios. I had a last trading month in the first half of the year. On the Treasury bill side, traders expect markets direction to be influenced by the announcement of an own auction by the CDN today, to HGQ equi, fixing come trader at Axis Bank joins me for a market for course. Thank you so much for your time, Toby. Well, just coming off the two dates, eat holidays, tell me how investors' sentiments are trading as of today. Is it a situation where they're still having a hangover from the two-day holiday? Thank you for having me. So today we saw the market open with a little bit of better sentiment. I think markets' investors reassess their positions about the holidays and excited that some of the yields that we see in the Treasury bills and bond speeds are still quite attractive. They will return for Treasury bills currently as positive, which yields around 18 percent. So today we're seeing investors buying up the one-year Treasury bills 20 May, 2027 NTBs. We've also seen slight interest in the bond speeds as we tried the short tenor bonds from 207s all the way to 29s. So today we've seen some interest. I think it's just on the back of Market Play has been the way for two days, so they came with a lot of energy today to make markets. Indeed, it was a time for them to reflect and reassess their portfolio. But let's look at how the first half of the year stranded was just by Monday we'll be having the first trading session for June. That's looking at how each one has been. Let's look at how the sentiments have been so far within this period, particularly in the Treasury bills space. So at the start of the year we start with quite elevated rates. I think at the start of the Treasury bill rates were around 22 percent at the effective view. We saw a lot of investors take advantage of the opportunity at the start of the year to lock in use at that time. We saw the risk at the trend low in February. I had a February NPC meeting where the CBN was expected and the NPC was expected to culture it. However, that is no materialised. But with the point forward through the rest of the year, the expectation is that rates will continue to go lower throughout the rest of the year. We saw markets pass pass continue to buy up fixed income securities, the Treasury Treasury bills, and that drew rates down to around 16 percent by April. I'm from April to May to the 2016 percent discount rates by April to May made the effect of the world that was started much, started to flow through to energy prices and for prices and transportation costs. So with market pass pass, there is a fairing inflation coming back with some people expecting rates, some increased probability of rates, especially from the developed markets like US, UK and Japan. So we saw that feeling to market sentiment. So market sentiment was a bit muted for some part of me. At all the end of the month with the US around close to it due, we see some activity coming back to the fixed income market that's clearly Treasury bill space. I mean in the FX space as well, we've seen some level of stability in terms of the narrow strengthening as well. Yes, so the same dynamics basically played out in the FX space. I started the year close to 1400 or there about, so I love inflows with market pass pass also thick advantage of the high interest rates in Nigeria. When the offshore community was quite interested, so they inflow the love of foreign currency that drew effects to appreciate at some point everybody, Q1 and Q2, it touched 1330, but after a while, we saw it stabilize around 1370. And that's been quite stable there for like the past four weeks, so I respect that, as I say, this will continue going forward. While we wrap this conversation, let's look at what the sentiment should be knowing that on the equity side, some major listing announcements and IPOs would be made. Do you think that will determine investors in their pursuit for higher yields in the fixed income market? It's one detail investors because a lot of investors in the fixed income markets have a particular percentage of their portfolio that they are located to fixed