We’ve been speaking about how risky bonds are right now and to expect a significant pullback. Few bond investors really understand even why such things should matter to them. It takes very little understanding of bonds or markets to get why the run-up that we’ve seen with bonds over the last year should concern us, […]
Over the din of all the moaning and groaning about low treasury yields, we told our readers to be wary of the higher risk represented by this. This is now starting to kick in. The price of a security, whether that be stocks, bonds, or anything else, is dependent upon future expectations. With a stock, […]
It’s not that we didn’t see this coming, but the buying frenzy that sent prices of U.S. treasuries to historic levels had to come to an end sooner or later. Sooner is here. While fundamentals do play a lot bigger role in the bond market than they do with the stock market, momentum still plays […]
Government issued bonds have traditionally had a maximum term of 30 years, but longer ones are coming into fashion. We might see some longer U.S. ones soon. When we are considering purchasing bonds, one of the main things that we look at is the term of the bond. When we buy bonds, we lend money […]
The talk of the bond market being in trouble, or at the very least undesirable, has been going on for a while. Bonds have gotten even more bullish lately, which is scaring them more. While we could say that there are a lot of people who don’t really understand the stock market that well, most […]
Bond funds have experienced a huge leap in popularity recently. While bond funds can be a useful tool, it is important that we understand their proper uses to get the most of them. A lot of people invest in stocks as their primary holding, and they understand pretty well how stocks work and what they […]
Many people are aware of how much more debt is held with negative yield government bonds these days, but corporate bonds can also trade at negative yield levels. Bonds with negative yields can appear to be strange things indeed among those who do not really understand bonds that well. This can even surpass our imaginations […]
A lot of investors are complaining quite loudly about the poor yields that today’s bonds offer in this low inflation environment. If we trade them instead, we don’t really care. Seeing bond yields plummet in value and then hearing people describe the bond market as very bullish right now might not make a lot of […]
Big box retailers have fallen into pretty hard times lately, but iconic American retailer J.C. Penny is simply becoming unraveled. Its bonds are really coming apart now. J.C. Penny has been around for a very long time now, first founded by James Cash Penney and William Henry McManus back in 1902. The company has seen […]
Stocks and bonds often move in opposite directions, especially when confidence in the stock market wanes. Given the correlation, does this mean that stocks are in trouble? We want to be careful drawing assumptions about causation from evidence of things being correlated, and messing this up is one of the most common fallacies that we […]