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How should investors manage bond duration in an era of rising and likely soon falling interest rates? The challenge. Long duration bonds lose value when rates go up. Shorter duration bonds can also lose value, but far less. What happens when the reverse occurs when rates falls, well, the value of long duration bonds go up, shorter duration go up but less. As it turns out, there are many ways
investors can take advantage of changing interest rates. I'm Barry Ritolts, and on today's edition of At the Money, we're going to discuss how to manage your fixed income duration when the Federal Reserve becomes active when it comes to interest rates. To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your portfolio, let's bring in Karen Vera. She is head of I Shares US fixed Income strategy for Investing Giant Blackrock. So Karen, let's just start with the basics.
What is duration, why does it matter? And why does it seem so confusing to so many bond investors.
So duration is simply the interest rate risk of a bond, or you can think about it, it's the amount that the price is going to change in response to a change in interest rates. So the nice thing is today almost any bond or bond fund will typically have that duration number published. So if the duration for examples five, if interest rates go up by one percent, that bond will drop in value by five percent. So it's a
pretty easy relationship to think about. I think where it gets tricky is that that's just an average for the bond or for the bond portfolio. But there's also durations or the interest rate risk at different points on the yield curve. So like two year, we call those key rate durations, so you can think of how much am I exposed to two year point, the five year point, ten year point, twenty and thirty. And then we also
have something called credit spread duration. How much does the bond's price change in response to changes in credit spread or the additional yield over treasuries. So I think when investors think through interest rate risk and how much risk they want to take, duration is a helpful measure for at least quantifying the loss that they could have from changes in rates.
So let's look at some real life examples. The FED began raising rates in March twenty twenty two. About eighteen months later, they pretty much finished and we were over five hundred points basis points higher then we began. How did that impact bonds, both short and long duration.
We actually had an in twenty two, one of the worst years in terms of bond performance in decades. The AG or the aggregate index, which is the broad measure of the tax wile bond market, was down about thirteen percent, and that has an intermediate duration, our duration of between five and six years. However, long bonds had double digit losses.
I think twenty plus year treasuries were down over twenty percent, and I think that was really hurtful for a lot of investors who had moved into bonds just coming off of the zero interest rate policy that the FED adopted after COVID.
And if memory serves me, I think twenty twenty two was the first year since like nineteen eighty one where both stocks and bonds were down double digit very unusual, you know, twice a century sort of thing.
That's right, and it really comes back to, you know, why we're interest rates going up whe it's stocks under perform it and it goes back to the inflationary environment post COVID inflation came back into the system and the FED needed to do needed to tighten interest rates in order to stop inflation and get the economy back on track. And so you know, we had investors reacting to that, and that's why we saw a year where both asset classes were down.
So prior to the initiation of that rate hiking cycle in twenty twenty two, it felt like, at least for most of my adult life, going back to Paul Volker as Chairman of the FED in the early eighties, interest rates pretty much did nothing but go down. It felt like, hey, for forty years we had nothing but on average lower rates. Is that an exaggeration or is that pretty much what took place?
No, no barrier spot on we did. We have seen interest rates fall, and I think it's for a few different reasons. I think the central bank got better at managing inflation, so if inflation is lower than the absolute level of rates are lower. We saw globalization where things became cheaper, more efficient, And we also have an aging population. In various studies we've seen that as economies age, interest rates tend to be lower. Our biggest consumption behavior changes.
So we had all of those tailwinds kind of pulling interest rates down over the years.
So that's forty years as far as you know. Is that the longest bond bull market in history, or at least in US history. I don't know what happened in Japan a thousand years ago, but yeah, I.
Think in modern he we could say modern history. I think that is a fair statement.
Right, and probably unlikely to ever be matched again in our lifetime or perhaps our kids and grandkids. So let's talk about what started a couple of years ago. The yield curve inverted. How does that impact bond investors? If you're getting paid the same for long duration as you are for short duration, why would you want to hold long duration paper?
Yeah, we've seen these inverted yield curves. They typically happen before recessions, and they typically happen when the market expects short term rates to come down following a period of rates being risen higher. So we're at the point where the yield curve is still inverted, and the response has
been pretty amazing by investors. They've all moved into ultrashort duration bonds, money market funds, bank deposits, or at all time highs In fact, even in August with a lot of the market volatility, we just observed we saw very strong flows coming into money market funds. So people are
literally sitting in cash. And then we have some data on the average financial advisor's portfolio is about seven percent in cash or ultra short term bonds, which is down from over ten to fifteen percent, So now they're sitting at seven. So we're still seeing a lot of even professional investors are keeping their keeping things in cash in response to this inverted yield curve.
So let's take a closer look at that. For a long time, investors or cash holders were getting practically nothing for a decade or so, but after the FED brought rates up to five and a quarter, you could get five percent and change in a fairly risk free money market. What sort of competition does that create for longer duration bonds and our money markets truly considered liquid cash, how do you categorize them?
I'll take the money market fund question first, So we do see money market funds are considered cash equivalents. You can typically get your money back within a day, just depending on the cutoff cycle you with the provider. So we see a lot of people sitting in those cash and ultra short term investments because they are liquid and they are yielding a lot. However, we're seeing more people wanting to add some duration. So if I can get
five percent today, that's great. But if the Fed starts cutting in September December really moves that overnight rate back down into that three percent range, which is what we think it will do over the long term, those five
percent yields are going to disappear on you. So we are seeing investors building bond ladders, adding intermediate duration because when that yield curve does start to reshape more, normally, where you get the most bang for your buck is in the belly of the curve, that three to seven year maturity. So not only can you lock in four or five percent yields there, but then you can get some price appreciation when interest rates begin to come down.
So that's really what we're seeing investors doing right now is moving out the curve a bit in response to the following rate environment that's coming.
So I'm glad you brought that up. We're recording this right after the Labor Day holiday weekend in twenty twenty four. Everybody has pretty much agreed Drome Palace come out and said it, Hey, we're going to begin cutting rates. The long wait is over. And you mentioned fifteen was it? Fifteen trillion went down to seven trillion in money markets?
Is the assumption that a lot of this is flowing into intermediate or longer dated bonds in anticipation of the FED cutting wor is going on with all that cash moving around.
We absolutely have seen a lot of people are still staying put. So we don't see people moving until they need to, until they actually see the rates drop on some of their money fund money market funds. But we are seeing some money coming into bondy tfs, both index funds and active funds. We're seeing more people building out bond ladders, so through term maturity ETFs such as our ivonds, So we are seeing some of the money move. We're
actually looking up north to Canada. Canada's gone through a few rate cuts now and we're seeing money in that market move back into bonds quicker than in the US on a percentage basis. So I think, well, we will see a lot of money move this fall and into twenty twenty five. I think when people actually notice that the rates are coming down in some of these cash like products.
So pardon my niavitae for asking such an obvious question. If you wait for rates to fall to move into longer duration bonds, haven't you missed it? I mean, don't you want to extend your duration before the rate cuts begin. In fact, we saw rates move down appreciably in August following the most recent the CPI data point was very benign. We've seen the restatement of labor data, which says, hey, the labor market, while it's still healthy, it's much less
overheated than we previously thought. It seems like the bond market is way ahead of both the stock market and the Fed. How do you look at this?
Markets are great about getting ahead of the next cycle, and we have seen that. We've seen interest rates coming down across the curve even before the Fed has moved. We think, though it's not too late, you're still going to get There's some uncertainty about how quick the Fed is going to cut, how quickly the yield curve is
going to reshape. So we're even using some of these days when rates go back up a bit, those are good entry points or better entry points to come back to bonds, so we don't think it's too late, and I think that the investors could rethink their strategy today to kind of get ahead of the next wave of cuts.
So that's the perfect segue into investors who are interested in fixing come and yield. What should these folks be doing right here at the end of the summer in twenty twenty four and heading into the fourth quarter.
I would say, think about your cash position. What are you using that cash for. If it needs to be
liquid for expenses and emergency fund, keep it there. But if it's part of your investment portfolio and you're just seeking the highest amount of income, you should think through what are the return to expectations over the next three, five, ten years and really use the opportunity to get that asset allocation back on track, that stock and bond mix and move out to some of more intermediate duration, because we think that's really where you're going to see the
biggest change in interest rates and you could get the most both price appreciation as well as still some pretty compelling income.
And our final question, how should investors be thinking about the risk of longer duration fixed income paper?
So longer duration fixed in come paper does have almost equity like volatility. It does have a double digit of volatility. We do see it as a very efficient hedge against equity markets. So if equity markets fall, we tend to see that flight to quality and investors go towards those long duration especially treasuries. We have a treasury ETFTLT it's
twenty plus years. It actually sell the highest amount of inflows of any ETF vehicle in the month of August because people were trying to hedge some of that equity market volatility. So if you have a portfolio that's very heavy in equities eighty ninety plus percent, you could add a little bit of long duration bonds and that would help smooth out the portfolio returns over time. So that's really the role that we think of with longer duration bonds.
So to wrap up, investors who have been enjoying five percent yields in money market and managing very short term duration bond portfolios should recognize, hey, rake cuts are coming. Jerome Palse said they were coming. This cycle is likely to last more than just a cut or two. The bond market is already starting to move yields down, and if you wait too long, you're going to miss the opportunity to lock in long duration, higher yielding bonds as
the cycle begins. I'm Barry Ridolts, and this is Bloomberg's at the money.
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