Although you may not find it likely, that is sort of the case. Bond prospectuses are very long (100s of pages sometimes) and complicated with tons and tons of b

Although you may not find it likely, that is sort of the case. Bond prospectuses are very long (100s of pages sometimes) and complicated with tons and tons of boilerplate language so most people focus on exactly 1 page of that (the "waterfall" describing payout and loss priorities).[1] Things like under what circumstances an instrument will convert are sometimes very complicated and people like Elliot Capital have basically made a career out of actually doing the homework and figuring this out better than everyone else. You can bet all sides have teams of securities lawyers pouring over the conditions of conversion of every single coco bond out there and these most of all. Part of the calculus for AT1/Coco bonds seems to have been that investors thought the bonds would basically never convert (and were certainly not pricing in the likelihood of being wiped out in this way) so they were getting paid for nothing. That is why the coco bond market has been so spooked by this. Some investors have been saying the cbanks have made a mistake because noone will ever buy AT1 bonds again, but cbanks seem to have gone off the whole AT1 idea and would prefer just real normal tier 1 capital instead so probably wouldn't mind that outcome too much. [1] Real life example: I was involved in the structuring of a bond and after a team of us working on it for 6 months and having poured over the prospectus through multiple drafts, after it had been in investors hands for 6 months we disagreed with lawyers about a very basic point (whether there were physical bond certificates or not) and ended up being wrong (there were - stuck in a custodian vault somewhere).