- Treasury Bills and DDEP Bonds Account for Nearly 90.00% Of GH¢1.53bn GFIM Session
Trading activity on the Ghana Fixed Income Market reached GH¢1.53 billion on Tuesday, September 8, with Treasury bills and Domestic Debt Exchange Programme bonds accounting for the overwhelming majority of transactions.
A total of 368 trades were recorded across government securities, corporate bonds and sell/buy-back transactions during the session. The distribution of activity continued to underline the market’s heavy dependence on sovereign instruments for secondary-market liquidity.
Treasury bills were the most actively traded category, recording GH¢782.11 million in volume across 310 transactions, equivalent to approximately 51.24% of total market activity.
DDEP bonds followed with GH¢579.28 million across 26 trades, representing about 37.95% of the session’s turnover. Together, the two categories accounted for approximately 89.19% of all trading, demonstrating the concentration of investor activity in government-backed instruments.
New Government of Ghana notes and bonds contributed another GH¢150.71 million, or approximately 9.87% of total market volume, through seven transactions. Old government bonds recorded just GH¢447,191 in a single trade, while sell/buy-back transactions involving government securities amounted to GH¢2.70 million across seven deals. Excluding corporate bonds, government-linked securities accounted for approximately 99.27% of the entire session.
The most actively traded individual security was a Treasury bill maturing on December 7, 2026, which recorded GH¢377.39 million across 53 transactions. The instrument closed with a yield of approximately 4.88% and a closing price of about GH¢98.81.
Its turnover alone represented roughly 24.73% of total GFIM activity, making short-dated government paper one of the clearest centres of liquidity during the session.
Activity was also substantial further along the Treasury bill maturity spectrum. A bill maturing on July 26, 2027 recorded approximately GH¢122.37 million, while the August 2, 2027 instrument generated about GH¢77.43 million and the March 15, 2027 bill traded roughly GH¢68.47 million.
The scale of trading across several maturities suggests that investors were not confined to the shortest available instruments, although the bill market remained decisively more liquid than the corporate segment.
DDEP bonds provided the second major source of activity, led by the 2023-GC-6 bond maturing in February 2032, which traded GH¢378.62 million in seven transactions.
The security’s closing yield eased to 14.22% from an opening level of 14.28%, while its end-of-day closing price stood at approximately GH¢81.01. That single bond accounted for about 65.36% of total DDEP turnover and approximately 24.81% of the entire market session.
Other DDEP securities also attracted meaningful activity, though at considerably smaller volumes. The 2023-GC-1 bond maturing in February 2027 traded GH¢80.55 million across 10 transactions, while the 2023-A-1 and 2023-GC-7 instruments each registered GH¢50.00 million. The 2023-GC-4 bond added about GH¢18.11 million, highlighting a concentration of liquidity within a limited number of the restructured government securities.
Trading in newly issued government bonds was concentrated entirely in the four-year bond maturing on September 2, 2030. The instrument recorded GH¢150.71 million in volume across seven trades, with its yield declining from an opening 12.00% to 11.94% and its closing price moving to approximately GH¢100.18. No trading volume was recorded in the seven-year new bond listed alongside it in the report.
Corporate debt remained a marginal part of the market, generating just GH¢11.09 million across 17 transactions and accounting for approximately 0.73% of overall turnover. Ghana Cocoa Board securities dominated this segment, with the August 2027 bond recording GH¢10.09 million across 14 transactions and the August 2028 instrument adding GH¢900,000. Combined COCOBOD trading amounted to approximately GH¢10.99 million, or about 99.12% of all corporate-bond activity for the day.
Petrosol Platinum Energy provided nearly all of the remaining corporate turnover, with two bonds collectively trading just under GH¢98,000. No volume was recorded in the Letshego, Bayport, Izwe, Kasapreko or Quantum securities contained in the trading report.
The thin activity outside COCOBOD illustrates the continuing challenge of developing a genuinely diversified corporate bond market alongside Ghana’s much larger sovereign securities segment.
Sell/buy-back transactions were also modest at GH¢2.70 million, compared with outright trading elsewhere in the market. The largest such transaction involved the 2023-GC-1 DDEP security, which accounted for GH¢2.28 million across four trades at a reported yield of 9.07%. These transactions provide a financing and liquidity-management function and should therefore be distinguished from conventional outright secondary-market purchases and sales.
The September 8 session ultimately presents a market with substantial headline liquidity but considerable concentration beneath it. Treasury bills and DDEP securities together represented almost nine-tenths of activity, while corporate bonds accounted for less than 1.00%, indicating that the expansion of GFIM turnover has yet to translate into equally deep private-sector debt-market liquidity.
For Ghana’s capital market, the longer-term test will be whether the liquidity and price discovery already visible in government securities can increasingly extend to corporate issuers seeking long-term domestic financing.
