A record number of investors are participating in the vehicle ABS sector and competition is increasing among issuers, prompting issuance and pricing close to pre-crisis levels. However, there are concerns that the strong performance by recent vintages of vehicle ABS will not last as underwriting standards loosen. Robert McDonald, a vice president at Goldman Sachs, said a vehicle ABS with 40 investors was previously considered to be a broadly distributed transaction. He said recent deals have had 60 investors. “We’re at an all-time high in terms of the number of unique investors for a transaction,” McDonald said at the American Securitization Forum’s ASF 2013 conference. Some $61.00 billion in ABS backed...