Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. Jack jumped over the…you know how it goes. As investors stomp their feet because stocks are going down (the horror), let’s not forget what’s happening to bonds. Anyone who reached for yield on the 30-year Treasury is learning about duration—basically, for every one percent increase in rates, bond prices drop, in percentage terms, by the years of maturity. In other words, if rates go up, long-term bonds get killed by a factor many times worse than short-term bonds. It’s pretty easy to hold short-term bonds to maturity, in times like these, and handle the … [Read more...]
Archives for February 2021
Democrats Have a Plan: Don’t Get Too Attached to Your Capital Gains
Democrats have found a way to put the Federal Reserve's reckless stimulus posture to use for them. They want to increase capital gains taxes to pay for their spending. Joseph C. Sternberg writes in The Wall Street Journal: A central Republican criticism of the $1.9 trillion Covid “stimulus” Democrats plan to ram through Capitol Hill is that taxes will have to rise eventually to pay back all the debt funding this spree. That’s more controversial than it ought to be—Democrats and their intellectual enablers seem certain money grows on trees—but it also elides an interesting question: Which … [Read more...]
Petrified Snow/Ice Fishing? How about a Boat? and More
One of the greatest things about winter is you can dream about summer. After a few days of warm(er) temps here in New England, we’re seeing some of the snow melt. Quite a bit, actually, has already melted in Newport, RI, except for those stubborn piles of petrified snow—not very pretty. I’m not sure it can be called snow. It’s more like groups of fossils. In speaking with you, most of you are between rounds one and two of the vaccine, not getting it at all, or already done with two rounds—and you’re all itchin’ to get out. It’s a common theme where you’re looking to move freely about your … [Read more...]
Bubble in Tech Stocks Will Cause “Clean Out” in Markets
Jamie Smyth and Robin Wigglesworth report on Peter Costello's view that the bubble in tech stocks being inflated by the world's central banks could cause a market "clean out." They write in the Financial Times: The world’s big central banks are inflating a bubble in technology stocks that will lead to a “clean-out” on global equity markets, the chairman of Australia’s $135bn sovereign wealth fund has warned. Rock-bottom interest rates and bond-buying programmes put in place to cushion the impact of the pandemic last year have left economies and markets vulnerable to a shock, Peter Costello … [Read more...]
COVID Chaos: New York and California vs. Florida and South Dakota
Recently at YourSurvivalGuy.com, you read about the Butterfly Effect— that’s “the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York,” explained by James Gleick in Chaos. In other words, the weather is like a domino effect. But what about non-weather events? Like a dead animal in China. Look at the COVID storm we’re in today. What’s even more disastrous is how government officials in certain blue states (Cuomo in NY and Newsom in CA) have created chaos. You just can’t make it up, especially when compared to Gov/s Kristi Noem, SD, and … [Read more...]
Time for the Fed To Stop Babying the Bond Market
At The Financial Times, Richard Bernstein suggests the Federal Reserve begin a tough-love campaign with the bond market. He writes: The Ferber Method, a sleep training technique, teaches babies to self-soothe and fall asleep on their own. It’s as much a training technique for new parents to ignore their baby’s crying as it is for the child to learn to cope by themself. The US Federal Reserve should consider Ferberising bond investors and ignore future “taper tantrums” like the market disruption that occurred when the central bank signalled tighter monetary policy in 2013. The long-term … [Read more...]
Richard Young Reports: 50+ Years with Fidelity and Wellington
I started in the institutional research and trading investment business at Model Roland & Co. on Federal St. in Boston in August 1971. Just up the street from Model were Fidelity Investments, and Wellington Management, both of whom I called on from my very first hours on the job. Over five decades ago, Ned Johnson, aka “Mister Johnson,” ran the show at Fidelity. Jack Bogle, “Mr. Mutual Fund,” had not yet left Wellington to start Vanguard. My focus in the initial going was international research and trading, and remains so today all these decades later. I still consider Fidelity and … [Read more...]
Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
In Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, author Laurence Gonzales explains, “The events that we call ‘accidents’ do not just happen. There is not some vector of pain that causes them. People have to assemble the systems that make them happen. Even then, nothing may happen for a long time.” In 1960, when MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz was modeling weather systems, he discovered a tiny change in the initial state (1 part in 1,000), explains Gonzales, was enough to produce totally different weather patterns. It became known as the Butterfly Effect, “the notion that a butterfly stirring … [Read more...]
Herd Immunity by April?
COVID-19 may be entering its final days. According to one medical expert writing in the WSJ, the U.S may see herd immunity by April. Dr. Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, writes: Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted? In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be … [Read more...]
Corporate Bond Yields: What You Can Earn Today
Corporate bonds are a good place to pick up yield in the bond market. With yields on government bonds in much of Europe and Japan in negative territory, corporate bonds offer a higher-yielding alternative. Corporate bonds are a broad universe, though. There are investment-grade corporate bonds, junk bonds, foreign corporate bonds, hybrid corporate bonds, and floating-rate corporate bonds among other variations. Investment-grade corporate bonds are the largest part of the corporate bond market. How Much Do Corporate Bonds Yield Today? We break the investment-grade corporate bond … [Read more...]
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