The Public Treasury reported that it raised 5,063 million euros in a recent one-year and six-month bond auction held this Tuesday. The auction saw a reduction in the cost of funding for 12-month notes while the yield on 6-month securities rose.
In the one-year segment, the marginal interest rate came in at around sixteen basis points lower than the January issue. The rate hovered at 2,839% for the span between December 2022 and mid-last month, while semi-annual bonds climbed by nearly a tenth to 2,693% from July 2022.
Overall, the Treasury allotted 4,000 million euros in one-year bonds and 1,062.7 million euros in six-month issues. Investor demand reached 7,861.71 million euros for the one-year bills and 2,327.09 million euros for the six-month papers, amounting to a total bid book of 10,190.8 million euros.
The average realized yield on the one-year bills stood at 2.813%, with semi-annual bills averaging 2.675%. In market terms, the Treasury satisfied just over half of the allocation for the one-year notes and a bit under six months’ demand for the shorter paper.
The strong appetite for short-term public debt helped drive robust participation from individual investors, a trend that has been building since the middle of the previous year as eurozone rates began to climb.
Source data from Treasury officials indicated a surge in retail activity, with roughly 300 million bids arriving in the previous week and a flood of demand that temporarily overwhelmed the Treasury’s website, one of the channels through which bonds are sold, and caused queues at the Treasury Bank. Spain’s retail market has play-by-play access to government securities in person.
On the same reports, the site previously averaging around 800,000 daily visits at the start of January was handling approximately 5 million visits last Thursday, underscoring the heightened interest from everyday investors. Retail participation represented about 2% of total demand for public debt, a modest share that nonetheless signals growing engagement in government securities among individual buyers.