Jan 08, 2026

CDS Question

I was listening to a sell-side market outlook where their CDS trader says:

"Away from the arb on some of those tight trading names, we don't really have many sellers of CDS, so one basically needs to arb in order to source CDS in the topical names at the title levels."

I don't understand what he means here at all. The CDS arb I think he's referring to is when the spread on the underlying bond is say, 500 bps, and the CDS on the underlying trades at 400bps. If you buy the CDS and buy the bond you are now flat credit risk and earn 100bps arbitrage profit, but this is only feasible if there are sellers of CDS in the market at all, which is apparently the problem here. Please help...

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