I've spent the better part of this week doing something I haven't done in a while: playing.
Not literally, obviously. I was in front of a screen, cutting AUM data by issuer, then by product type, then by underlying, then back again, just to see what would fall out. But that's what it felt like. Since we rolled out the new SPi Market Analytics, I've been going through data the way I used to go through a new toy as a kid, turning it over, poking at it from every angle, mostly just to see what happens when you press the button, you're not supposed to press.
A few things fell out that are worth sharing.
France is growing, and autocallables are doing most of the lifting. SP AUM in France is now EUR 310 billion, up 30% YoY. Autocallables alone account for EUR 221 billion of that, up 32.8% YoY. Do the maths and autocallables are roughly 71% of the French market and growing slightly faster than the market as a whole. Nothing shocking if you've been watching France for years, but seeing it broken out cleanly, filtered in a few clicks rather than stitched together from three spreadsheets, is the kind of thing that makes an afternoon disappear.
Decrements keep climbing, but the number that actually stopped me was hiding one filter deeper. Decrement indices now represent 31% of all live autocallable products, up 40.81% YoY. That's a number I expected. We've been writing about decrements for months. What I didn't expect, until I filtered by rate type, was this: Interest Rate autocallables are now 12% of the market, up 104% YoY. That's not a typo. That's a category more than doubling in a single year, from what was, not long ago, a rounding error.
That's the bit I keep coming back to. Decrement growth is a story we've told. Rate-linked autocallable growth at over 100% YoY is a story nobody's telling yet, and it was sitting there the moment I filtered on the right field.
French autocallable outstanding volume by sector
