Bloomberg reported on Friday, 6 November, that SoftBank Group’s dollar bond due in 2032 fell 0.9 cents, its biggest drop in 10 weeks, according to Bloomberg-compiled data. Its notes were among the biggest losers in Asia, and its shares fell as much as 16%, Bloomberg said, under the headline “SoftBank Leads Asia Bond Losses as AI Rout Spreads to Credit”.
The prices were already below face value before Friday. Of the 14 SoftBank Group dollar note lines that last traded on 4 or 5 November on FINRA’s TRACE system, 13 printed below par, our count shows. The lowest was the 8.25% notes due 2065, at 90.25 cents on the dollar.
Business Pill · Financial Conditions
A short explainer on financial conditions: how the price of credit moves with markets. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss SoftBank.
The key insight: As we read it, SoftBank’s dollar notes were already priced below face value before Friday: 13 of the 14 lines that traded on 4-5 November last printed below par on TRACE, by our count. Then, Bloomberg reported, its 2032 dollar bond fell 0.9 cents on Friday, its biggest drop in 10 weeks.
We could read only parts of Bloomberg’s article, which is behind a paywall. In those parts, Bloomberg said the selloff in SoftBank’s notes followed a blowout in credit default swaps tied to some US companies behind the AI buildout.
Yield premiums on Asian dollar bonds widened at least 3 basis points, traders said, according to Bloomberg. The average spread for Asian investment-grade dollar bonds rose to 73 basis points, the highest since July 2025, Bloomberg reported. A basis point is a hundredth of a percentage point.
ChainCatcher, in a report republished by KuCoin, relayed the same figures and dated the 73 basis point reading to Thursday. It added that the extent of selling in credit markets remains below that seen in equities. The parts of Bloomberg’s article we read do not say which of SoftBank’s 2032 dollar notes fell 0.9 cents.
In Tokyo, SoftBank Group shares closed at 3,549 yen on Friday, down 10.83% on the day, Kabutan’s daily price table shows. That is 58.9% below their 2 June close of 8,632 yen, the highest daily close in the May-to-November rows we read, by our arithmetic.
Points below par at the last reported trade for the 14 SoftBank Group dollar note lines that traded on 4 or 5 November 2026, from FINRA TRACE last-sale prices queried at 11:29 UTC on 6 November, before Friday’s session in Asia. Our count and arithmetic (100 minus price). A last sale is a single trade, and two lines can be the same note.
What the Trade Prints Show
FINRA’s TRACE system records trades in dollar corporate bonds. We queried it at 11:29 UTC on 6 November for SoftBank Group Corp. It returned 20 lines; 14 carried a coupon and had last traded on 4 or 5 November, before Friday’s session in Asia.
Thirteen of those 14 lines last printed below 100, our count shows. Only the 8.625% notes due April 2030, on one line, printed above par, at 100.2. The furthest below par were the 8.25% notes due 2065, at 90.25, and the 7.25% notes due July 2032, at 91.721.
FINRA gives a yield for three lines. The 9.25% notes due April 2032 last traded at 97.5 on 5 November, a yield of 9.853%. The 9.75% notes due April 2034 traded at 97.375, a yield of 10.261%, and the 8.625% notes due April 2030 at 99.688, a yield of 8.727%.
A last-sale price is a single trade, and two lines can be the same note sold under different rules. The 9.25% notes due April 2032 appear twice, at 97.5 and at 99.805.
The Cost of Protection
SoftBank Group’s 5-year credit default swaps widened 22 basis points to 466 basis points, their highest level since 2022, Reuters reported early on 6 November, in a headline relayed by FirstSquawk on X. We covered that move in our piece on the Nikkei.
At 466 basis points, protecting $10 million of SoftBank debt for a year costs about $466,000, by our arithmetic. On 20 October SoftBank’s five-year CDS stood at 432 basis points, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, as we reported. That is 34 basis points lower, by our arithmetic, though the two readings come from different reports and may use different data.
Update, 6 Nov, 13:04 UTC: Musk says SoftBank is “defaulting on their turbine orders”.Elon Musk wrote on X at 06:25 UTC on November 6: “SoftBank is defaulting on their turbine orders.” The one-line post was a reply to a post that quoted an unusual_whales report of the roughly $500 million data center loan sale, and it had about 983,000 views when we read it at 13:02 UTC.
The post does not say which turbine orders, from which supplier, or how large they are, and Musk offered no evidence in the post. SoftBank had not responded publicly, OfficeChai reported. We found no SoftBank or supplier statement confirming a missed payment or a cancelled order.
Musk is not a neutral observer here: he runs xAI, a rival to OpenAI, into which SoftBank has poured tens of billions, as OfficeChai noted. Until a primary source confirms it, this is a claim by Musk, not an established default.
As we read the prices, the 9.25% notes due April 2032 last traded at 97.5 on TRACE, a yield of 9.853%, so buyers at that price were asking for more than the coupon.
As we read the two markets together, the shares closed 10.83% lower in Tokyo on Friday, while the 2032 bond’s 0.9-cent fall was its biggest in 10 weeks, Bloomberg reported: equity and credit moved on the same day, by different measures.
As we read the CDS figures, 466 basis points on 6 November compares with 432 basis points on 20 October in our earlier piece, though the two readings come from different reports.
Bloomberg, 6 November 2026
“The average spread for Asian investment-grade dollar bonds rose to 73 basis points, the highest since July 2025.”
Three Implications
FOR SOFTBANK Its dollar notes last printed below par on 13 of 14 lines that traded on 4-5 November, our count of FINRA TRACE data shows.
FOR HOLDERS OF PROTECTION At 466 basis points, protecting $10 million of SoftBank debt costs about $466,000 a year, by our arithmetic.
FOR ASIAN CREDIT The average spread for Asian investment-grade dollar bonds rose to 73 basis points, the highest since July 2025, Bloomberg reported.
The framework argues: “It is a sovereign-scale financing problem dressed in tech-company clothing”.
As we read it, SoftBank’s dollar notes are one place where that financing is priced every day. The framework does not discuss SoftBank’s bond prices on 6 November.
What Is Not Established
The parts of Bloomberg’s report we read do not give the 2032 note’s price or yield after its 0.9-cent fall, or name the note. The TRACE prices in this piece predate Friday’s trading in Asia. We did not see SoftBank comment on its bond prices, and we did not contact SoftBank.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
Anthropic’s Reality Check, The Capital Squeeze, & The New World Order
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a growthstory. This week it started being priced as a credit story.
SoftBank’s dollar bond due 2032 fell 0.9 cents on Friday, its biggest drop in 10 weeks, Bloomberg reported. On TRACE, 13 of 14 SoftBank dollar note lines that traded on 4-5 November had last printed below par, by our count.
A note on sourcing. Bloomberg’s article is paywalled; we read only the passages reported here, and ChainCatcher’s report via KuCoin. Bond prices and yields are FINRA TRACE last-sale data queried at 11:29 UTC on 6 November 2026. Share prices are from Kabutan’s daily price table. The CDS readings are from Reuters (via FirstSquawk) and Bloomberg data, as reported in our earlier pieces. The counts, the 58.9% fall, the $466,000 figure and the 34 basis point difference are our arithmetic. We did not contact SoftBank.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
