- GFIM Starts the Week with Investors Hiding in T-Bills
Trading on the Ghana Fixed Income Market opened the week with a distinctly defensive tone, as investors concentrated heavily in Treasury bills and left much of the longer-dated government bond curve comparatively thin.
According to the GFIM trading report for Monday, April 20, total market volume came to GH¢359.56 million across 438 trades, with Treasury bills alone contributing GH¢268.15 million by far the largest share of activity. That means roughly three-quarters of all traded volume on the day was clustered at the short end of the sovereign market, reinforcing the view that investors remain more comfortable with liquidity and near-term maturity than with duration risk.
The rest of the market was materially smaller. DDEP bonds recorded GH¢56.88 million in traded volume across 10 trades, while sell-buy-back trades in government notes and bonds accounted for GH¢30.00 million. Corporate bonds contributed GH¢3.84 million, and new Government of Ghana notes and bonds saw only GH¢687,358 traded. There was no recorded volume in old Government of Ghana notes and bonds.
The imbalance is telling. It suggests that while liquidity remains present in the fixed-income market, conviction is still strongest where maturities are shortest and pricing is easiest to defend. In effect, the GFIM is still functioning as a market that prefers rollover comfort to duration exposure.
The single largest Treasury bill trade was GH¢63.98 million in GOG-BL-27/07/26-A6953-1991-0, while the biggest DDEP transaction was GH¢35.00 million in GOG-BD-10/02/32-A6148-1838-9.10, which closed at a yield of 13.3%. In the new bond segment, the most active instrument was the 7-year GOG bond maturing March 29, 2033, though the segment itself remained marginal in the day’s broader flow.
Treasury bill activity was spread across a wide range of maturities, but the breadth of trades did not change the broader message: the market is still choosing short paper first. That preference mirrors what has become a recurring pattern in Ghana’s domestic fixed-income market, where investors appear willing to fund the sovereign, but increasingly on terms that preserve flexibility.
In the DDEP segment, activity was concentrated in a handful of benchmark lines, particularly around the 2027 to 2032 maturities. That suggests there is still tactical appetite in selected restructured bonds, but not enough to shift the market’s centre of gravity away from bills.
Corporate debt, by contrast, remained peripheral. At GH¢3.84 million, the segment’s contribution was too small to materially affect the day’s market tone, leaving sovereign instruments to dictate overall flow and sentiment.
Monday’s report is therefore not simply that trading was active. It is that the market’s risk appetite remains narrowly defined. Investors are still participating, but they are doing so with a strong bias toward short-dated government paper and only selective interest in longer bonds. Domestic liquidity is clearly still available, but the shape of demand shows that confidence is being expressed cautiously and mostly at the front end of the curve.
