Recent weeks have seen a whipsawing of expectations for the economy and the path of interest rates. The yield on the 10yr Treasury, a key benchmark, rose to over 4% a few times and interest rates in general have been quite volatile. But the upward path seemed destined to continue as inflation headed higher and the Fed kept raising rates to fight it. Or at least that was the dominant narrative for a while.

Lately, however, expectations have shifted given that inflation has been steadily waning and the economy, for all its pluses, seems headed toward recession. That and recent news of bank failures has pushed more investors into bonds for safety and higher yields, which has pushed the 10yr Treasury yield back below 3.5%. Other investors now think they’ve missed the boat and that maybe they should wait for yields to go back up before buying more. But will rates go back up?

The following article from JPMorgan addresses this and talks about the queasiness some investors feel about bonds given such poor performance last year. That may be true, but we still need to navigate the market we have and not wait for the one we hope for. At least according to JPMorgan, the one we have is this: We’re heading into a recession, the Fed may cut interest rates to spur growth, yields track with what the Fed does, so the bond market offers a good opportunity right now.

That logic seems pretty straightforward but, of course, it’s never that simple. There’s lots of news out there about how this and that indicator always forecasts recession, and many do. But we’ve also never gone into recession when the job market remains this strong. The official unemployment rate is 3.5%, up a tick from a historic low in February.

Maybe we enter a recession, maybe we don’t. Either way, a lot remains to be seen and the outlook and dominant narratives are sure to shift multiple times in the coming months. If nothing else, yields on short-term investments are higher than they’ve been for a long time, so I think it’s wise to put excess cash to work now instead of waiting.

From JPMorgan…

At the start of the year, the term “soft landing” was a common refrain from both policymakers and investors. However, despite the most aggressive Federal Reserve (Fed) rate hiking cycle since the 1970s, growth has remained robust and inflation has moderated. The possibility that central bankers might have managed to thread the needle by bringing down inflation without damaging growth initially pushed recession forecasts out to 2024, but the banking crisis in both the U.S. and Europe has seen a sharp tightening in financial conditions as lenders strike a cautious tone and hold back on extending credit to the real economy. This was reflected in the most recent Senior Loan Officer Survey from the Federal Reserve, which showed a sharp tightening in lending standards to U.S. firms. If credit to the economy is choked off, then the ripple effects from recent bank failures could well pull forward the timing of any recession and potentially bring the Fed’s rate hiking cycle to a premature end. 

Following the latest Fed meeting on March 22, the Chair of the U.S. Fed, Jerome Powell, acknowledged that a credit crunch would have significant macroeconomic implications that could potentially influence the trajectory of Fed policy. However, he added that “rate cuts are not in our base case.” Despite the Fed Chair’s comments, market pricing of the pathway for the Fed Funds rate has shifted markedly in the last few weeks. Investors now anticipate that a Fed pause is imminent and that they will begin cutting rates as soon as September 2023 as growth slows and inflation continues to abate.

As the Fed ponders its next step, investors should be mindful that the window of opportunity that has emerged in fixed income may slam shut quickly. The yield on the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Index ended March at 4.4%, close to its highest levels in nearly 15-years. However, as shown in the chart below, the yield of the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Index is closely tied to the Fed Funds rate; in prior recessions, as growth has stalled, the Fed has lowered rates and bond yields have quickly followed suit.

After seeing the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Index fall by 13% in 2022 – its worst year on record – it is understandable that some investors may feel queasy at the prospect of jumping back into fixed income markets. However, it is important to remember that the yield of a bond benchmark provides a reasonable estimate of its forward return. As such, with the current yield offered by the bond markets potentially the high-water mark for this rate hiking cycle, investors could be well-served by taking advantage of this opportunity before the window begins to close. 

Here's a link to the article if you’d like to read it in situ.

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News in recent weeks has shed a brighter light on how important liquidity is to our financial success. Lots of people, even the folks who run banks, can think they have more liquidity than they actually do because they’re counting an asset as liquid when it really isn’t.

Like I mentioned recently, liquidity is generally defined as how quickly and cheaply we can access money when needed. Cash in the bank is liquid and safe assuming deposits are within the limits of federal deposit insurance. Investments in heavily traded stocks and bonds, or common funds that own them, are also considered liquid because you can sell them quickly and often with no transaction fee. You can lose money on stocks and bonds if you have to sell at the wrong time, but good planning can help with this – the point being that this money is gettable without restriction, making it liquid.

Some of our largest assets, like our home, our car, boat, or maybe original artwork aren’t liquid. We can usually sell these assets, but doing so takes time and money to get a fair price. All of us have a mix of liquid and illiquid assets and there’s nothing wrong with that – striking the right balance is key and this is where people can get into trouble.

Another common type of illiquid asset is an annuity contract. We’ve discussed these at some length before. The simplest type is buying future income – you trade a lump sum today for regular income lasting X years, or maybe the rest of your life. You pay a present value for that future income stream and the annuity company, on it’s own, promises to keep paying. That’s pretty simple and there are valid reasons why one would seek out something like this.

Annuities quickly get more complicated from there and, quite honestly, should be avoided. There are numerous reasons for this as well, but one that’s top of mind this morning is how annuities are said to be sold and not bought, that a salesperson needs to convince a customer of an annuity’s virtue because you’d never buy it on your own – it would quickly fail the sniff test.

The problem, of course, is that there are thundering hordes of salespeople incentivized to push this stuff all day long and lots of people end up buying. They fall for “guaranteed” and “high rate of return” and fail to realize, often because they’re never told (shown deep within a 90-page disclosure doesn’t count) that the salesperson is receiving a fat commission on the sale and how that commission grows as the purchase amount grows and the annuity terms get worse, and how the alluring guarantee is only as good as the insurance company’s health which, as with certain regional banks of late, can change rapidly.

At issue this morning is an update to a string of excellent reporting by The Wall Street Journal about a Yale-educated financier and the thousands of annuity contract owners left in a lurch after the shell game he seems to have been running began imploding. $2.2 billion worth of accounts are frozen and, unfortunately, that leaves lots of folks waiting on lengthy court battles.

If you read these stories you’ll notice one throughline being how the investor’s “financial advisor at their local bank” (that combo alone should be a red flag) told them how “safe and easily accessible” these contracts were and how it was a smart investment since bank CDs were yielding less. The investors were often talked into putting too much of their liquidity into these more complicated forms of annuity, another common problem, and are now suffering the consequences. I hate reading stuff like this. How can we know so much and yet learn nothing? Maybe a third of your money into illiquid assets, but more than that and you’re asking for trouble.

These stories and the innerworkings of the sales organizations that peddle these products are a big reason why I started my firm nearly ten years ago. Back then I resolved, among other things, to never ever get clients into a liquidity crunch by putting their money into fundamentally illiquid investments while leading them to believe how liquid they were. It’s a horrible abuse of trust by people who should have known better. (That many of the salespeople are specifically trained not to know, to have a form of plausible deniability, is an ongoing issue in my industry and we can save those details for another day.)

So maybe view all this as a cautionary tale about putting too many eggs into one basket and, if you will, the power of trust and how easily abused it is.

Here's a link to the piece I mentioned. Let me know if you get blocked by the WSJ’s paywall and I can send it to you from my account.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thousands-of-retirees-cant-withdraw-savings-invested-in-firms-controlled-by-indicted-financier-greg-lindberg-6a268369?mod=trending_now_news_4

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By now you’ve probably heard about the failure/seizure of Silicon Valley Bank. The surprise announcement came last Friday and coincided with two other bank failures closely tied to the tech sector. This, of course, roiled markets late last week and led to a frantic weekend for policymakers and regulators deciding how to calm things down. News has been evolving rapidly but, as of this writing, the government is again backstopping deposits that go beyond its insurance limit.

Lots has been written about this in recent days and I don’t want to simply repeat it here. Instead, let’s consider what this latest fiasco teaches us about a fundamental aspect of personal finance: how to think about liquidity and structuring your cash.

Personal liquidity, or the ease at which you can access your cash, is critically important to your financial health. Covering regular bills and emergency expenses is obvious, but less so are the psychological benefits of having ample cash.

But how much cash is enough? How do you keep it safe? Should you put your cash to work so it’s not just sitting there feeling like it’s doing nothing?

Questions like these are a constant issue for everyone, including corporations. SVB and the other two failed banks had to address these questions, chose the riskier paths, and are now paying the price. SVB grew quickly in recent years and invested excess deposits in longer-term bonds when rates were low. They didn’t diversify very well and got caught by rising rates and falling bond prices like everyone else last year. Then good ‘ol Mr. Murphy showed up with a cash emergency (an old-fashioned bank run fueled by technology) and the losses in SVB’s bond portfolio were deep enough that the bank couldn’t meet the rush of withdrawal requests coming in from depositors.

Definitely a cautionary tale on taking risk with the wrong money… but thinking about structuring cash I’ve found that a three-tier system works best. You could call these tiers, buckets, levels, or whatever you want. The point is having clear differentiation while focusing on safety.

Tier 1 – Immediate needs and a slush fund

This should be your ready cash at the bank or credit union. A few months’ worth of regular spending is usually fine. This money needs to be truly liquid, and interest earned on this balance is secondary to immediate availability. But is it safe?

As you’re likely aware, the federal government insures deposits up to $250,000 per person, per institution. So a couple owning a checking account together at a typical bank would have up to $500,000 of their deposits covered against risks like a bank failure. FDIC covers banks and credit unions have the NCUA. The details of stacking insurance coverage higher than that get complicated and are beyond the scope of this post. Google the relevant organization and each has an insurance calculator on it’s website.

Evolving news about the government backstopping all deposits at SVB notwithstanding, federal deposit insurance literally only gets you so far. Should your balances move north of the limits at one bank you’ll need to find a second one. This leads us to our next tier in your cash management structure.

Tier 2 – Your primary short-term holding tank – this money should earn more than what your bank pays on deposits.

While you can have multiple banking relationships to maximize federal insurance, I think a better option is to move excess cash to a brokerage account.

What’s excess? Some folks simply prefer to have lots of cash at the bank, but you should have a specific amount in mind so you’ll know how much you can get more creative with (again, clear differentiation). This tier is your excess emergency fund plus money earmarked for near-term (the next year or so) larger expenses like buying a car, the downpayment for a house, and so forth. The job for Tier 2 is all about maximizing yield while staying safe, so creativity shouldn’t equal market risk.

Options for this money are:

Money market funds – You buy these in your brokerage account without a transaction fee and are considered cash equivalents. The funds are usually priced at $1 price per share and fund managers typically buy CDs, bonds, and so forth, maturing in something like 30 days or less. The catch is that you usually need to wait a business day or two before accessing your cash.

CDs – Certificates of deposit are federally insured bank deposits that pay a set rate for a set time and usually don’t allow for penalty-free early withdrawals. You can stagger, or ladder, the maturity dates to meet your specific needs. Obviously this complicates your liquidity and is why you should always keep some money truly liquid.

US Treasury securities – These are short term government bonds that, similar to CDs, have defined rates of return and specific maturity dates.

I’m a firm believer in not going beyond these three options for short-term money. You can mix and match them depending on rates at the time and personal preference, all within one brokerage account. Just no trust deeds, crypto, or even medium-term bonds. SVB apparently put shorter-term money into longer-term bonds in a reach for yield. Maybe it was a calculated risk, but it sure came back to bite them. We don’t want to get into trouble with this money so keep it simple.

Tier 3 –

Once you have Tiers 1 and 2 dialed, your humble financial planner suggests that you probably have enough short-term money. Beyond that, in Tier 3, you can get into medium-term money. Maybe it’s for a big expense a few years away. Or maybe you just like some extra insulation from a risky world. Whatever your reason, options here are broader and include:

Longer-term CDs. This should be self-explanatory.

High-quality bond funds and individual bonds of medium-term. The main bond benchmark has a duration of around six years, so stick to no more than that. Money in bond funds is gettable in a day or two but comes with market risk. Bonds like these lost around 10% in value last year, which was far from typical, but still paid regular interest. This money needs to sit awhile and that makes it inappropriate for short-term spending needs. It should earn more than Tiers 1 and 2, however, while taking less risk than longer-term investments like stocks.

There are lots of other investments out there vying for your money, but I’ve specifically left them out. Remember, we’re talking about short- and medium-term cash management. We want ease of use, high quality and liquidity, not long-term appreciation. That’s the realm of your growth-oriented investments likely held in your retirement accounts. Again, focus on locating your money and risk in the appropriate places and your financial life will be a lot healthier. Doing so should also allow you to brush off news of bank seizures and venture capitalists crying for a bailout.

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The first quarter (Q1) of 2023 ended well for stocks and bonds, making for the second positive quarter in a row. It was a nerve-wracking time for investors, however, as bad news seemed to continually outweigh the good.

Here’s a roundup of how major markets performed during the quarter:

• US Large Cap Stocks: up 7.5%
• US Small Cap Stocks: up 2.7%
• US Core Bonds: up 3.2%
• Developed Foreign Markets: up 9%
• Emerging Markets: up 4.1%

It’s been a rough ride for investors in recent quarters, and especially those with a moderate risk tolerance who hold stocks in their portfolio but also a sizeable portion in bonds. Both asset classes were down last year, so it’s great to see positive returns to start 2023. Those returns weren’t easy to come by. Whether it was continued news about inflation and how much and for how long the Fed would keep raising interest rates, mixed with bank failures during March, the news cycle played havoc with investor sentiment throughout the quarter.

Across markets, tech stocks that took a beating last year were up the most during Q1. Chipmaker NVIDIA, Meta (the parent of Facebook), and Tesla were each up over 60% by quarter’s end but the latter two stocks and the sector as a whole are still down over the past year. There are a variety of explanations for this positive turn but for sectors like Tech and Communication Services this was primarily a snapback as sentiment shifted around the likelihood for a softer recession than originally feared.

The worst performing sector was Financials, down almost 6% in Q1, for reasons obvious to anyone paying even remote attention. While inflation was still a foundational theme for the quarter, early March greeted us with surprise news that Silicon Valley Bank, a large but “local” CA institution, had been seized by regulators following a bank run lasting just a few days. Then another, Signature Bank of NY, was shuttered and quickly everyone everywhere was waiting for the next shoe to drop while checking up on their federal deposit insurance. A short time later we had news that another publicly traded bank, First Republic out of San Francisco, was on the ropes. The Fed and others quickly came to the banking system’s rescue, buoyed First Republic, and generally settled everyone down. The result, at least in part, was the positive broad market performance posted above.

Another result of March’s mini banking crisis was a major shift in the outlook for inflation, Fed interest rate moves, and recession. Inflation rose quickly last year before peaking midsummer. Since then inflation has been trailing off every single month. Unfortunately inflation was still about 6% as of February, 4% higher than the Fed’s target. During Q1 this meant that the Fed raised short-term interest rates by 0.50% spread over two meetings, a slower pace than in prior months. But given reverberations from the bank failures already mentioned, the Fed is expected to slow its pace further, or even stop raising rates, as it waits to see how these events might help reduce inflation.

Potentially impacting the Fed’s assumed “dovish” turn is a realization that they’ve already done enough in the last year to slow the economy, perhaps too much. A variety of indicators suggest that we may already be in recession or might be in one soon (as a reminder, recessions are only called well after they’ve started). GDP data has been weakening and leading economic indicators are pointing to recession. The yield curve that we’ve discussed elsewhere is also deeply inverted and that’s always indicated a coming recession when the inversion is this large. And specific sectors of the economy, such as housing, are already there on a national basis.

On the bond side of your portfolio, expectations for a gentler Fed helped bonds recover a bit during Q1, with the primary bond index returning over 3% for the quarter. Bond investors are now assuming the Fed starts lowering rates during the second half of this year, based on the recession risks already mentioned. Only time will tell who’s right, of course, but it’s always interesting to watch bond investors trying to anticipate Fed policy.

While all this might sound downright gloomy for investors, April has typically been one of the strongest months of the year for stocks. And, according to Bespoke Investment Group, year three of a presidential election cycle is often quite strong as well. Beyond that, and from a contrarian perspective, market sentiment is abysmal and that typically bottoms before stocks start a longer positive run. We could be looking at a seemingly ironic situation where our investments start doing better as the broader economy starts doing worse, part of the normal long-term cycle.

So what should we be doing in this sort of environment? The news cycle will continue to be crazy, but we should keep charging ahead with our investments while managing risk in a prudent way. And with the rest of our personal finances we should take stock as we plan for recession. Evaluate your cash needs and review your personal liquidity structure. Try to pay down any higher-rate or variable debt and avoid taking on new debts if possible. The recession may be mild by historical standards but, whatever the length and severity, it’s best to plan ahead anyway. As always, we’re here to help in this process.

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“Bank failures are caused by depositors who don’t deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement” – Dan Quayle (Maybe he was misquoted...?)

Before we begin this week’s post I wanted to remind you that I’m open for your questions about bank safety, the security of your deposits, and so forth. We’ll touch on these topics below but know you can always ask questions.

Beyond that, I have to say it was eerie to read about another hasty merger over the weekend to keep a bank from failing. This time it was Swiss regulators arranging a marriage of the failed investment bank, Credit Suisse (CS), to UBS, the largest of that country’s banking institutions.

Back in September ’08 it was weekend news that BofA was buying Merrill Lynch, the world’s largest retail brokerage at the time amid nasty and worsening market and economic conditions. Both Merrill and CS failures resulted from years of bad risk management but, in the case of CS, also the bad luck of showing the last of a lengthy string of big losses while investors are in the mood to punish.

It’s natural for news like this and of recent bank failures to seem like the opening act of another Global Financial Crisis. There’s lots of uncertainty, investors are skittish, and the trust we give to these institutions can seem misplaced. But is this another 2008? While predicting something like that is far beyond my ability (or anyone’s, quite frankly), this latest news is different and it’s too simplistic to lump the failure of CS in with the seizure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and what may be the final throes of First Republic Bank.

Here are some points on this from my research partners at Bespoke Investment Group (italicized below) that I’m cobbling together. Unitalicized notes are from me.

A good and simple explanation…

During the pandemic, enormous fiscal transfers and Federal Reserve QE of government bonds meant an enormous buildup of deposits in the banking system. Those deposits were created by either issuance of government bonds or by purchases of those bonds, financed by bank reserves which match with deposits. Banks faced with those massive inflows of deposits generally bought government bonds. Unable to invest in riskier securities or grow loans rapidly thanks to macroprudential regulation (ironically, largely a regulatory response to banks being too risky leading up to the Global Financial Crisis), banks were forced to buy low credit-risk government bonds.

While those bonds don’t have a credit risk, they do have duration risk. As long as banks aren’t forced to sell them thanks to ample deposits, they do not have to recognize a mark-to-market loss on those holdings (the “held to maturity securities” reference in the chart below). But for banks that are under deposit pressure, things can get out of hand quickly. Concentrated crypto deposits (like at Silvergate or Synchrony) or exposure to specific demographics (like at Silicon Valley Bank or to a lesser extent First Republic) that fled quickly led to stress and ultimately a need to wipe out equity, though for now the total losses remain unclear.

(An interesting side note to this whole thing is how focusing on liquidity, whether for your household or the bank you might manage, is foundational to your financial success; mess with it at your peril.)

On to CS – much less a function of the charts above and more from bad timing and fed-up investors…

…In the press conference on Sunday discussing the shotgun ‘merger’ between Credit Suisse and UBS, regulators and officials of the banks cited the turmoil in the US banking sector as the reason for Credit Suisse’s demise. There’s always a need for a scapegoat, but to blame regional US banks for Credit Suisse’s downfall is a stretch. For now, let’s put aside the fact that just last week Credit Suisse announced an $8 billion loss in its delayed annual report.  The bank noted that “the group’s internal control over financial reporting was not effective,” and its auditor PriceWaterhouse Coopers gave the bank an ‘adverse opinion’ with respect to the accuracy of its financial statements. Well before the SVB failure, Credit Suisse was already a dirty shirt.

Just look at the stock price. From its peak of over $77 per ADR in 2007, Credit Suisse (CS) has been in a long downtrend. After bottoming at just under $19 in early 209, the share price quickly tripled over the last six to seven months, but the bounce was short-lived. By 2012, the share price was back below its Financial Crisis lows and in the ensuing years, any rally attempt quickly ended with a lower high followed by a lower low. The collapse of SVB and stresses on other US banks may very well have been the straw that broke Credit Suisse’s back, but if the bank had proper internal controls in the first place maybe it would have noticed the pile of hay on its back in the first place. 

So, the problems of CS seem only loosely connected to the regional bank news we’ve been seeing here at home. But news of bank failures comes on the back of inflation and rising interest rates, volatile markets, and an economy that one day seems strong only to show weakness another.

Crises never play out the same way twice, of course. There are more banks flush with deposits and sitting on bond market losses they’d rather not be forced to realize. As I write, First Republic Bank’s stock price is down to about $12 after trading at nearly $150 a month ago and the bank is in emergency talks with JPMorgan and others. Maybe First Republic gets through this, but the damage is done.

The Fed has come to the rescue and big banks are getting bigger. A narrative of the system protecting itself (or eating its young) seems to mollify investors. Broad market indexes were higher yesterday amid all this news and, at least as of this writing pre-market Tuesday, prices are set to rise again. That’s good to see in the short-term but risks remain. We’re still likely heading into a recession of uncertain severity that, in a sense, seems like a natural result of the wild swings our economy has been through in recent years. But I’m going to cross my fingers and knock on wood while walking out on the limb to say that the wheels aren’t coming off of the global financial system anytime soon.

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Some years ago I did a short series of posts defining some key finance and investing terms. Looking back I don’t see that we discussed a critical concept, especially these days with rising interest rates: yield.

Yield is one of the words in the English language that has multiple meanings depending on the context. We yield to oncoming traffic when driving our car or, if we’re a farmer, our lands yield crops. While the fundamental meanings of yield probably seem obvious, the term can get muddy pretty quick in my realm. Let’s get into the details of how we think about yield in an investment context.

The yield of a stock investment is pretty straightforward. Say XYZ Corp offers a dividend to shareholders each calendar quarter of $1 per share and you paid $100 to buy one share. After receiving your first dividend you could say that your yield is 1% but hold the share for a year (four quarters) and your yield is now 4% and should be expected to remain so until XYZ Corp changes its dividend policy, or you sell your share.

That math is pretty simple. Where it starts getting interesting is when the value of XYZ Corp shares moves around with the markets and you keep buying. Maybe you bought more shares at $90. Your $1 dividend on the new purchase is now a 1.11% yield per quarter, or 4.44% per year. This gets blended with your original $100 purchase to equal 1.05% quarterly and 4.2% per year. Then this gets complicated further if you reinvest your dividend, perhaps buying fractions of a share at whatever the current price happens to be.

Fortunately we have software to keep track of all this stuff, but one takeaway should be that your yield is a function of the cash you’re receiving while holding shares and what you paid to buy the shares. It’s not your investment return when we talk about stocks because, at least in theory, the growth potential is limitless.

So that’s stocks, but let’s look at bonds because that’s where yield is most important. Rates have moved around a ton in the past year and the dynamics of yield in the bond market can be confusing. Let me explain.

In our example above XYZ Corp has announced a dividend that’s not reflective of the company’s share price, just what management is giving back to shareholders and there’s no legal requirement for them to do so.

But this is different with most bonds. Bonds, as you’re likely aware, are debt obligations that come with strict requirements to pay a set rate of interest for a set timeframe before paying off the debt at maturity.

Take Treasury bills, notes, or bonds (all hereafter referred to generally as “bonds”) as an example because it’s simplest.

The US Treasury borrows money by issuing bonds across a range of maturity periods. Let’s assume you bought 10yr bonds brand new on www.treasurydirect.gov that pay 3.5% interest each year until maturity. Assuming you spent the interest your yield would be the same as your interest rate, or 3.5%. This would also be your investment return each year you hold the bond. Pretty simple.

Just as with stocks, however, there is an active secondary market for many bonds, especially US Treasury securities. According to SIFMA, an industry organization, as of January the daily average trading volume for Treasuries was at least $615 billion. Among other things, this means you can see your bond’s value change in real time and can readily sell if needed.

Since we’re usually buying bonds in the secondary market understanding our yield becomes more important than the interest rate that bonds pay. The reason is that we’re almost never buying bonds at the original issued value of $1,000. Instead, we buy or sell at a premium or discount that’s constantly changing due to market conditions.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. This screenshot is from the system I use to find and buy individual bonds and looks at a Treasury Note maturing in about a year.

You’ll see that the interest rate is only 1.5% but the Yield to Maturity is about 5.2%. The higher yield, as mentioned above, is a function of the bond’s interest rate and the price you paid to buy it, in this case $965 instead of the original $1,000. While holding the bond you’d receive the 1.5% per year, paid every six months. But then at maturity you’d get $1,000, not the $965 you originally paid. That’s the discount coming back to you and is what bumps up your yield.

We’ve been discussing individual bonds so far and most of you own bond funds instead. Funds have lots of benefits over owning the individual bonds and are best thought of as everything we’ve already discussed but spread across hundreds or thousands of bonds in a portfolio. Instead of a defined maturity date, bond funds are perpetual and are often grouped together by different maturity periods (short-term, medium-term, and so forth) and issuer type (US Treasury, publicly traded corporations, etc).

I could go on, but I try to keep these posts on the shorter side. In any case, the main point is that, as investors, our yield is the cash flow we’re getting from our investments adjusted up or down based on what we paid to buy the investment and is a critical factor when thinking about bonds.

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