False as stated. The Marktpflegequote (market-care quota) is a scheduled feature of every German government bond auction — all 596 Bund auctions since 1999 carry one, including auctions covered more than twice over. Retained securities are held by the federal government itself (Eigenbestand des Bundes) and sold gradually into the secondary market by the Finanzagentur — they are not bonds “nobody wanted” but volume deliberately withheld from the auction price. What is true: the quota's size flexes with demand, and a large quota in a weak auction is a soft-demand signal. The existence of retention proves nothing of the kind.
§ 3.1 The term, before the verdict
Concept · The MarktpflegequoteWhat the retention quota is, and why a “failed auction” is the wrong reading of it, is worked through in the primer — long‑and‑short · The Marktpflegequote (German).
Marktpflegequote — literally “market-care quota”: the portion of an auction's nominal volume the Bund books into its own account instead of allotting it, used afterwards for operations in the secondary market. This page checks the video's reading of it against the issuer's own words and 27 years of the record; the official definitions come first.
§ 3.2 What the issuer says it is
Generell hält der Bund bei jeder Auktion ein gewisses Nominalvolumen
zurück (Marktpflegequote), das im Anschluss an die Tender nach und nach im Rahmen der
Sekundärmarktaktivitäten in den Markt abgegeben werden kann. Die Höhe der Marktpflegequote
fällt von Auktion zu Auktion unterschiedlich aus, liegt seit 2006 im Schnitt jedoch bei unter
20 % des Emissionsvolumens.
Einbehaltene Marktpflegequote (Eigenbestand des Bundes) —
Platzierung am Sekundärmarkt durch die Finanzagentur des Bundes.
Two things follow from the official wording. The retained bonds sit on the Bund's own books — not the Bundesbank's — and they are routinely sold, later, at secondary-market prices. Both are the opposite of “unsellable.”
§ 3.3 What the record shows
If retention indicated rejection, it would appear only in weak auctions. Instead it appears in all of them — the era averages barely move while era-average demand ranges from 1.2× to 2.0×:
| Era | Avg bids ÷ offer | Avg retention |
|---|---|---|
| 1999–2007 | 1.63× | 16.6 % |
| 2008–2014 | 1.2× | 19.4 % |
| 2015–2019 | 1.21× | 20.6 % |
| 2020–2022 | 1.36× | 18.5 % |
| 2023–2025 | 2.0× | 18.9 % |
| 2026 | 1.47× | 19.2 % |
In 2023–2025 — the strongest demand era in the whole record, auctions covered 2.0× on average — the Bund still retained 18.9 % of every issue. Nobody argues those bonds were “rejected.”
§ 3.4 Reading the evidence
Every Bund auction since 1999 retains part of the issue; era-average retention stays between 16.6 % and 20.6 % regardless of demand conditions. Officially, retained volume is federal own-holdings released later via the secondary market.
Within a single auction the quota flexes with demand — 35.0 % on the weak 08 Jul 2026 10-year versus quotas of 4.2 % and 1.4 % on the more-than-twice-covered 20-year auctions of 22 Apr and 13 May 2026 (though not uniformly: the 2.1×-covered 20-year of 24 Jun still retained 10.4 %). So the answer to “liquidity management or weak-demand evidence?” is: an instrument of the first, whose size can carry a signal of the second. The video collapses that distinction into “proof of rejection” — which the same instrument in strong auctions refutes.
“Investors no longer want Bunds” as a blanket statement is opinion; the auctions it points to placed billions at market yields the same week.