- 364-Day Bill Leads Ghana Fixed Income Trading With GH¢242.42m
Trading on the Ghana Fixed Income Market reached GH¢1.03 billion on Friday, August 14, 2026, with Treasury bills and Domestic Debt Exchange Programme bonds accounting for the overwhelming majority of market activity as investors continued to concentrate on government securities.
Total volume traded across all fixed-income categories stood at GH¢1,034.98 million from 823 transactions, according to the GFIM trading report. Treasury bills alone recorded GH¢543.14 million, equivalent to 52.48% of total market turnover, while DDEP bonds contributed another GH¢366.08 million, or 35.37%, meaning the two segments together accounted for approximately 87.85% of activity.
The dominance of those instruments highlights the continuing importance of government securities to Ghana’s fixed-income market, particularly as investors balance liquidity requirements against the search for predictable returns. Corporate bonds and sell-buyback transactions generated meaningful activity, but the scale remained substantially below that of Treasury bills and restructured government debt.
The most actively traded Treasury instrument was the bill maturing on August 9, 2027, which recorded GH¢242.42 million across 28 transactions. The security closed at a yield of 12.80% and a price of 88.76, accounting for 44.63% of all Treasury bill trading and 23.42% of total GFIM turnover for the day.
That concentration suggests investors were particularly active towards the longer end of the Treasury bill maturity spectrum rather than restricting trading to near-term instruments. The August 2027 security had 360 days remaining to maturity, giving investors exposure close to a full year while offering a yield materially above the shortest-dated bills trading on the market.
Activity across the Treasury curve was nevertheless broad, with the segment recording 792 transactions, by far the largest number among all categories. This matters because transaction count provides an indication of how widely trading is distributed, even where a relatively small number of large-value deals account for a disproportionate share of total volume.
DDEP bonds remained the second-largest segment, generating GH¢366.08 million from 17 transactions. Trading was concentrated heavily in the February 2032 bond carrying a 9.10% coupon, which recorded GH¢138.45 million across just two transactions and closed at a yield of 14.60% and a price of 79.65.
That single bond represented 37.82% of DDEP turnover and 13.38% of all trading on the GFIM. The size of the transactions illustrates how institutional activity can materially alter daily fixed-income turnover, particularly in the longer-dated government bond market where individual trades can run into tens or hundreds of millions of cedis.
Another significant DDEP instrument was the February 2027 bond carrying an 8.35% coupon, which recorded GH¢90.99 million across eight transactions and closed at a yield of 11.73%. The February 2028 bond also attracted GH¢60.00 million, while the February 2030 instrument recorded GH¢30.00 million, showing that activity extended across several points on the post-restructuring government yield curve.
Prices on several longer-dated DDEP securities remained well below par, reflecting the yield demanded by investors for holding longer-maturity government debt. The February 2032 bond, for example, closed at 79.65, while the February 2034 security closed at 75.44, reinforcing the distinction between the relatively stronger pricing of shorter maturities and the larger discounts attached to duration further out on the curve.
Corporate bond trading contributed GH¢60.04 million, representing 5.80% of overall market activity. Virtually the entire segment came from three trades in the Ghana Cocoa Board bond maturing in August 2027, underscoring how thin corporate fixed-income trading remains relative to government securities.
The COCOBOD instrument recorded GH¢60.04 million and closed at a price of 99.52. While the transaction was substantial in value, the fact that corporate turnover was concentrated in a single instrument highlights the limited breadth of Ghana’s secondary corporate bond market and the continuing challenge of building deeper liquidity outside sovereign and quasi-sovereign securities.
Sell-buyback transactions in government bonds generated a further GH¢65.70 million, equivalent to 6.35% of total GFIM turnover. Almost all of that activity came from the February 2031 DDEP bond, which recorded GH¢65.49 million across three transactions at a yield of 13.73% and weighted average closing price of 84.32.
By comparison, trading in old government notes and bonds remained negligible at just GH¢22,640, while the newer government bond segment recorded only GH¢4,710. The new seven-year government bond maturing in March 2033 closed at a yield of 12.11% and a price of 101.72, but the limited volume meant it had virtually no impact on the day’s overall market activity.
The August 14 session therefore reinforces a familiar pattern within Ghana’s fixed-income market: liquidity remains heavily concentrated in Treasury bills and selected DDEP securities, while corporate bonds and other government instruments attract significantly less secondary-market activity.
For investors, Treasury bills continue to offer a relatively liquid route to short- and medium-term government exposure, while DDEP bonds provide higher yields further along the maturity curve but with greater duration and price risk. The sharp concentration of large-value trades in selected instruments also suggests that headline turnover can sometimes be driven by institutional transactions rather than a broad-based increase in activity across every security.
The deeper challenge for the GFIM will be expanding that liquidity beyond a relatively narrow group of government instruments. A more mature fixed-income market would ideally support active trading across sovereign bonds, corporate debt and other securities, giving issuers more financing options while providing investors with a wider range of risk and maturity profiles.
For now, however, Friday’s GH¢1.03 billion turnover tells a clear story: investors continue to favour the most liquid parts of Ghana’s government debt market, with Treasury bills firmly at the centre and selected DDEP bonds providing the other major source of activity.
