Bank of MontrealFernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
With such a dominating lead in equity league tables, TD Securities will be hard to catch by year-end, but BMO Nesbitt Burns sure hopes to give them a run for the money.
To do that, BMO keeps hitting home runs with a new sweet spot: energy. Though the investment bank is best known for its mining team, the energy group out of Calgary has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting of late.
The latest deals include Vermilion Energy Inc.'s $250-million equity offering on Tuesday morning (co-led with CIBC) and Pengrowth Energy Corp.'s $300-million common share offering on Monday.
Go back a few weeks, and BMO can also add Gibson Energy's $252-million secondary offering to the list, as well as $219-million of two recent Paramount Resources financings. Add them all up, and that's more than $1-billion underwritten in a month.
None of this would have been possible had energy not become the hot sector. Since bottoming out around $76 (U.S.) per barrel in October, oil has shot back up to $97, and Canada's natural gas producers are buoyed by the prospect of exporting liquefied natural gas to China. All of that has pushed the TSX energy sub-index up 19 per cent since it hit a floor in early October.
Tim Kiladze