Credit Suisse may have pulled off a sale of a decent slab of contingent convertible bonds to strategic investors in the Middle East, but the deal says very little about the coco bonds' eventual acceptability among a broader group of investors.

Credit Suisse's surprise BCN (buffer capital note) issue is indeed a smart deal. It's a $6bn swap for existing tier-one hybrids that were issued at the height of the financial crisis to investment companies in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The swap will yield a small boost to the Swiss bank's earnings, potentially by 100 basis points in its 2013 bottom line.