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The Frederickson facility in Pierce County, Wash., owned by Capital Power LPHand-out

For the first few weeks of 2013, it looked like Canada would get left in the dust.

Around the world a flurry of new equity issues were coming to market, kicking off the new year on a hopeful note. But here in Canada, yield-oriented real estate investment trusts were still driving the bus and issuance was down heavily from 2012.

What made it all the more perplexing was that the S&P/TSX Composite Index posted a stable, if not strong performance, hovering north of 12,000 for a few months and steering clear of any wild swings. You would think investor confidence would be high.

Finally, though, it looks like the drought's coming to an end. This week the Canadian market's seen some sizable deals, including Capital Power's $150-million equity offering and Superior Plus's $125-million bought deal, and more have come in the past 24 hours, including a $250-million offering from MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates and a $94-million bought deal from Kelt Exploration.

The hope now is that this rate of issuance continues. A few weeks back there was one very promising day when $1.9-billion of new issues hit the market, but the pace didn't last for very long. At least this time there are stable jobs numbers that should give investors more confidence. And the word on Bay Street is that there are some other deals being lined up, they just need stable markets to see the light of day.

However, the investment banks have to hope the syndicates will be a little less crowded than the group that underwrote Kelt Exploration's offering. The public portion of the deal amounted to $61-million, yet 11 underwriters were involved, making it hard to divvy up the syndicate economics.

Around the world this year $123-billion has been raised, according to Thomson Reuters. Of that, $47-billion came from the United States, up 77 per cent from the year prior. That's encouraging for Canada because we tend to follow our neighbour to the south.

(Tim Kiladze is a Globe and Mail Reporter.)

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Tickers mentioned in this story

Study and track financial data on any traded entity: click to open the full quote page. Data updated as of 28/03/24 10:23am EDT.

SymbolName% changeLast
CPX-T
Capital Power Corp
-0.18%38.13
KEL-T
Kelt Exploration Ltd
-0.33%6.06
MDA-T
Mda Ltd
+0.83%14.64
SPB-T
Superior Plus Corp
-0.4%10.06
TRI-N
Thomson Reuters Corp
+0.99%157.49
TRI-T
Thomson Reuters Corp
+0.58%212.9

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