Good evening,

Hats off to NIB Holdings for braving equity capital markets and pushing ahead with its $135 million institutional placement on Wednesday.

Before NIB’s brave call, no Australian company had gone to market raising anything more than a few bob all week.

The standoff’s because CPI data in the United States isn’t due out until Thursday night, Australian time. And last month, that CPI number was higher than expected and caused markets to tank.

So, all week, we’ve had little happening in equity markets. Volumes have been low, fund managers have sat on their hands ahead of the economic data, and deals almost non-existent.

NIB’s deal was expected to price at or towards the bottom of the range, which was an 8 per cent discount to the last close. It’s a respectable result given market conditions, and will have the health insurer on the hunt for more NDIS-related acquisitions.

Elsewhere, we revealed Accel-KKR is back sniffing around Australia’s Elmo Software, and the target’s responded to the approach with a round of due diligence.

We also caught wind of a recruiter searching for a new country head at PE firm Affinity Equity Partners, with stalwart Sam Johnson preparing to exit.

It’s a blow for Affinity, and another one in a growing list of offshore-based PE firms experiencing a changing of the guard in Australia.

Happy reading,
Anthony Macdonald, Sarah Thompson and Kanika Sood
Street Talk editors