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Posts Tagged ‘Sell Bonds’

Your Bonds Need Your Help

February 5th, 2025 by Kurt L. Smith

Everyone seems to have some bonds. There are tens of trillions of dollars in bonds out there. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) puts the figure at $46 trillion in the United States and $119 trillion worldwide. Closer to home, municipal bonds now make up $4.2 trillion of the market, per the Federal Reserve, with individuals making up 70% of the market (about $3 trillion) according to Franklin Templeton.

As we discussed last month, investors in the bond markets own the market. Everyone’s portfolio looks like everyone else’s portfolio. When the municipal market started 2024 like a house on fire, everyone benefited. Year-to-date returns, per Bloomberg’s Municipal Bond Index, approached double digits through the first three quarters, only to lose almost all of it in the fourth quarter.

This is what happens when you are not investing with the trend. The trend for bonds is lower prices. I discussed for many months how trending markets will usually undergo a multi-month correction, and that is how I was describing 2024’s bond performance. Individuals piled into municipals, not realizing they were buying into a bond bear market and at the wrong time.

Investing in bonds the same way one has always invested in bonds is…, well you tell me. Look at your results over the past year, or three years, or five years. You are investing in a market in which the trend is down. And you are paying for the privilege, either a little, or a lot.

When it comes to bonds, it also does not matter what fund you own or who the manager is or what their past performance has been. You own bonds and in a bear market your performance is going to suffer. Since seemingly no one has determined that this is a bond bear market, I would say the greatest suffering is yet to come.

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It’s A Bull, Bull, Bull World

November 30th, 2022 by Kurt L. Smith

After forty years of bull market in financial assets, one can only imagine how difficult a change in trend may be to recognize. We live in a bull market world, enjoy the bull market experience and we have been doing so, for so long, we believe it is just the way things are.

The bull market has existed for both stocks and bonds for decades. Rather than serve to diversify one’s portfolio, stocks and bonds have been in a tortoise/hare race to the top. Unlimited optimism, or even abundant optimism, can only push bond prices so high, but for stocks, truly the sky was the limit.

So, it might make sense that the bond market might be the first to signal the bull market is over. The bond market performance story for 2022 has not yet been fully written, but unprecedented, the word used in these letters over the past several months, will surely be included.

Yet despite a treasury bond trading at half its value over a two-plus-year span, you would think investors would recognize this as a bond bear market. Staring at not only the worst bond market return in decades, but perhaps ever, we saw bond prices soar in November with Bloomberg saying last week “municipal bonds are having their best month in almost four decades.”

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Merely Gaining Steam

April 28th, 2022 by Kurt L. Smith

Last month I discussed whether the bond bear market had finished its first leg down or was it merely gaining steam. Over the past few weeks, we got an answer to that question.

I also discussed the importance of stocks moving to new highs or there is a risk for a larger correction. What is a larger correction? I believe we can place Netflix (NFLX – NASDAQ) as the new poster child for the definition of larger correction. At its recent price of $193.50 on April 27, 2022 (all prices and yields per Bloomberg), Netflix is down 72% from its all-time high of $700 set just five months earlier on November 11, 2021. Again, merely gaining steam.

The “What, me worry?” crowd continues to fiddle while Rome burns. The losses in bellwether US treasury notes and bonds over the past several months is unprecedented. The losses in the NASDAQ for April 2022 may be among the worst months ever. 3% mortgages are now 5% mortgages and inflation is, pick a number, 8%?

My get-out-of-bonds mantra for the past two years has now morphed into get-out-of stocks. Normalcy was exceeded months ago and is now moving toward extreme, yet capitulation evades us. Instead, we are looking at wave after wave of continued downward prices for financial assets.

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Worst Quarter Since 1973

March 30th, 2022 by Kurt L. Smith

Bloomberg published this line on March 22nd as their US Treasury Index had lost 5.55% since year end, surpassing the 5.45% loss at the beginning of 1980, the biggest quarterly decline since their index was created. In the middle of the bond bear market’s first move, this type of poor performance is to be expected.

Some people look at the bond market’s performance as the tortoise versus the stock market’s hare. Every day, bond investors look into the mirror (at bond performance) and it looks as if little has changed. Here, in the early stages of the bond bear market, nothing could be further from the truth.

The yields on the risk-free US treasury bellwethers we track have soared over the past two years. The 1.5% treasury note of February 15, 2030, sold at a .31% yield (111-19) on March 9, 2020 (all yields/prices per Bloomberg). This past week that note traded at 2.52% (92-23). This is an almost 19-point loss or 17% on the bellwether ten-year treasury note. Longer maturities fared far worse. Our bellwether is the 2.375% of November 15, 2049, and it sold at .70% or 140-17 on March 9, 2020. Last week this bond sold at 2.67% (94-09) for a 46-point loss or 33% of value.

Bond bear market? I do not recall reading that headline in the New York Times or splashed across magazine covers of late. But a dribble here and a dribble there while looking in the mirror has eroded significant values in the risk-free-rate US treasury market.

Almost all this price erosion happened before the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates. That did not happen until March 16th. So much for fed leadership; how’s that for Fed response?

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Be Prepared

February 24th, 2021 by Kurt L. Smith

The past week has been a tragedy down here in Texas. One crisis morphed into another leaving dozens dead and tens of billions in destruction. Simply terrible and preventable.

As a Texas native, ridiculously cold weather for a ridiculously long (for us) time is not a once in a century experience. Every decade or so it happens. But Texans are not all native Texans now (or ever). Texas has been growing by transplants forever and their expectations eventually collide with a horrible reality.

A gardener prepares his garden in the winter. A homeowner prepares her pipes before they freeze. An investor prepares for the downturn as the market moves higher. There is time for celebration but there is also time for work, the preparation what comes next.

Last month we focused on the ten-year Treasury note and long bond. Friday, February 19th, those sold at new low prices (high yields). The long Treasury bonds has now lost 35 points in value from March 9, 2020 at 140.17+ to 105.05+ Friday (all prices from Bloomberg). One of the recently sold ten-year Treasury notes, the .625% of August 15, 2030, has now lost more in price that it ever promised to pay investors in interest over its ten-year life, trading at 93.6875.

These treasuries are, of course, the favorite investment for the Federal Reserve Bank. Their appetite for all treasury securities has grown on their balance sheet from about $2.5 trillion a year ago to $4.8 trillion now (per Bloomberg). All the while, their price continues to fall.

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The Market Doesn’t Care

October 20th, 2020 by Kurt L. Smith

Voting is in full swing across our nation and I am sure you will be voting as well if you haven’t already. While we all care about our election, the market does not.

In a world filled with varying narratives, not to mention conflicting narratives, narratives do not move markets. News, breaking or not, also does not move markets. Yet markets move, even in ways that may convince you that something, or someone (or several someone’s) may be responsible.

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Prepared?

March 5th, 2020 by Kurt L. Smith

From record high to worst week since the financial crisis in October 2008, stocks ended thirty-plus years of bull in dramatic fashion. The top bull in the better than best of recent asset pricing is taking the leadership role in the great deflate.

From a high of 29,568 on February 12 to an end of month low of 24,681, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost over 4,000 points with 3,600 of it in one week (source: Bloomberg). This is not your normal pull back. This is not the buy the dip (one more time!). This is the end we have been talking about since November 2017 in my letter, Top of Tops. In that letter I noted 23,500 as the all-time high turning point for stocks. The extra run since then was a bonus.

You all know I have been writing about asset prices being at the end of something. From the depths of the financial crisis in March 2009 to February 2020, it was quite a ride. A ride I believed would be over (in November 2017) but continued through Groundhog Day (after Groundhog Day) 2020.

Consequential? Unbelievably so. This isn’t even the worst part. From my point of view stock investors “haven’t lost anything” as they are still ahead of November 2017. No, the worst part is ahead of us because it involves the bond market.

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The Bigger Picture

October 15th, 2019 by Kurt L. Smith

Summer was extended down here in Dallas. Ninety-plus degree days almost every day in September. Seemingly the same thing every day, like the markets these past many months. Change will happen, though it seemingly hasn’t yet.

When we drew our line in the sand, almost two years ago, that the next move for stocks would be down, little did we know how long the wait might be. Obviously I stand by my call because I bring it up often. More importantly it still holds up well. What have you missed in stocks?

But if you haven’t sold some of your stocks you haven’t built up your cash and you haven’t increased your commitment to The Select ApproachTM. Unlike every other investor, you have The Select ApproachTM as an alternative to stocks, bonds, gold, commodities, real estate, private equity and whatever other mash up you may or may not have tried.

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Sell Bonds

September 12th, 2019 by Kurt L. Smith

The Select ApproachTM believes the bond market correction of the past nine months is now over.

Last month we talked about the giddiness of bonds and that giddiness delivered bonds onto the front pages of the major dailies. The New York Times on August 28th probably marked the high prices with this headline “While Wall St. Talks of a Recession, Bond Investors Make a Killing. You should have bought bonds. They’re going great.”

The NY Times also included a nice chart of year to date returns. “Thirty year Treasury bond +26.4%, Long-term bonds +23.5%, Investment-grade corporates +14.1% and Ten Year Treasury notes +12.6%.” Indeed, stellar returns essentially describes the bond market correction of the past nine months.

In order to reap the rewards of this year’s bond market moves, one must sell. Not your Select ApproachTM bonds, but everything else. This market move was a trade, and a short-term one at that, and now it is over. The bond market is in a long-term bear market since 2012. Prices move down (yields rise) setting the trend and in order for the market to continue to lower prices, a correction needs to occur. Ebb and flow happens but the important part is the direction of the trend for bond prices is lower.

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