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| BondsOnline.com: instant access to and extensive coverage of over 3.5 million stocks, bonds, indexes and other securities covering major and emerging markets and exchanges across the globe. |
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| Bonds Online |
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| 5/10/2013Market Performance |
| Municipal Bonds |
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S&P National Bond Index
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3.00% |
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S&P California Bond Index
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2.96% |
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S&P New York Bond Index
|
3.13% |
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S&P National 0-5 Year Municipal Bond Index
|
0.70% |
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| S&P/BGCantor US Treasury Bond |
400.09 |
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| More |
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| Income Equities: |
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| Preferred Stocks |
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S&P U.S. Preferred Stock Index
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848.03 |
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S&P U.S. Preferred Stock Index (CAD)
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636.26 |
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S&P U.S. Preferred Stock Index (TR)
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1,701.05 |
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S&P U.S. Preferred Stock Index (TR) (CAD)
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1,276.26 |
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| REITs |
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S&P REIT Index
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174.07 |
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S&P REIT Index (TR)
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425.30 |
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| MLPs |
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S&P MLP Index
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2,469.58 |
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S&P MLP Index (TR)
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5,428.50 |
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See Data
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The Growing Impact of "Mini Muni" Bonds |
SmartMoney - May 9, 2011 - By Russell Pearlman
Thousands of small, unrated municipal bonds are hitting rocky times and missing payments. Will bond investors see their portfolios suffer?
Of all the places to park cash after the financial crisis, the Oppenheimer Rochester Municipals fund seemed like an obvious choice. The fund, as its name implies, is filled with municipal bonds, those boring pieces of debt that typically finance sewers, highways and other civic projects. Those bonds have offered attractive yields and, for New York residents in particular, a ton of protection from taxes. So it's not surprising that the fund's assets grew more than 30 percent in the year after the crash.
But it turns out, the $7.7 billion fund, one of the largest muni bond funds in the U.S., has been buying things that might surprise investors. The fund owns bonds that finance run-of-the-mill drainage projects and roads, but it also has a stake in a financially strapped nursing home, a hospital that has missed two bond payments and a charter school that shut its doors. The fund even owns the bonds of the American Folk Art Museum, known for its collection of unique quilts and, now, for not making payments on its $32 million in debt. (Its revenue fell almost 75 percent in two years, according to public documents.) Smaller, less traditional bonds like these seldom have independent ratings of their creditworthiness, but they make up almost one-fifth of the Oppenheimer fund's holdings. And the fund has underperformed the industry's main benchmark by nearly four percentage points during the past 12 months. Dan Loughran, the fund's manager, attributes those numbers to market conditions and downplays the impact of these little bonds; indeed, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bonds the fund holds are considered to be in default. But he agrees this type of debt could cause more trouble for investors. "There is no government that is legally or morally on the hook to use taxpayer money to bail them out," he says.
Over the past year, what has historically been one of the safest investments in America hasn't felt quite so safe. Last June pointed out that there were cracks in the $3 trillion municipal bond market. Since then, there's been a flood of headlines about budget woes in California, Illinois and other states, and their struggles to pay their billions in debt. On a 60 Minutes segment in December, one expert even predicted that muni defaults could reach levels unseen since the Depression. But while investors have been fretting over the high-profile, multibillion-dollar state bonds, the next chapter in the muni mess has been unfolding outside the spotlight, involving a class of much smaller bonds that get little if any taxpayer support.
For the complete article.
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| Stuff to look at |
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Income Security Recommendation January 2013 Issue.
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