Fallen angels have been on the ups in recent months, says Bloomberg. The reason? Our old friend low oil prices, which have caused the fallen angels — corporate bonds rated investment grade at one point, but now plummeting to junk — to now comprise USD 22 bn of the USD 52 bn in securities eligible to join the Bloomberg Global High Yield Corporate Bond Index in April. “The degree of the movements was very unusual — the underperformance compared to the double-B index of the recent downgrades was over four times what we have historically seen. The atypical magnitude is primarily attributable to the fact that most of the recent falling angels were energy names. If we exclude the energy names from our sample set we see that performance is by and large normal,” said Citigroup analysts led by Stephen Anzak in a note published on 8 April.