| 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
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3.13% |
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S&P National 0-5 Year Municipal Bond Index
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0.70% |
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| S&P/BGCantor US Treasury Bond |
400.09 |
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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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Is it time to think about bear market cures? |
USA Today - Aug. 26, 2010 - by John Waggoner
Some common bits of wisdom are easier to follow than others. If leaves are three, let it be? No problem. Don't buy fireworks from a guy with three fingers? Makes sense.
Probably the hardest investment maxim to follow is to buy stocks when everyone else is selling them. There's good reason for that: The majority of investors, most times, are right. Being a contrarian works only at extremes of market psychology, and those are difficult to discern.
Nothing wrong with cowardice, especially if it means preserving your principal. But if you do feel the urge to wade into the stock market now, you can ease some of the pain of a bear market.
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The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is down about 14% from its April 23 peak — not a bear market yet. Investor sentiment, in the meantime, is lousy.
According to Investors Intelligence, which monitors investment advisers' opinions about the market, just 33.3% were bullish, vs. a more typical reading of 50% or so in a strong market.
By contrary reckoning, high bearishness is good: When everyone is bearish, after all, everyone has sold their stocks and a rally should follow. Current bearishness isn't high enough to call a turning point, says John Gray, co-editor of Investors Intelligence.
The traditional cure for a bear market is cash: short-term, interest-bearing and highly liquid investments that are unaffected by the stock market. At the moment, cash returns virtually nothing. That's better than a loss, but not much.
The other traditional cure for a bear market is government bonds, which tend to move in the opposite direction from stocks. Suppose you had invested $4,000 in long-term Treasury bonds three years ago and $6,000 in the S&P 500. As of the end of July, you'd have $10,146 in your account. That's not fabulous, but it's better than the $8,103 you'd have if you had invested $10,000 in the S&P 500.
Bonds are no panacea, however. The bellwether 10-year Treasury note currently yields 2.48%, which is a low rate to lock into for a decade. And if you're a bond-fund investor, rising interest rates will hurt your fund's total return — price return plus reinvested interest.
A few alternatives
If you're looking for better returns than you could get from bonds or money funds, then you have to look at stocks — and, as we mentioned earlier, the current market is what strategists call "stinky."
That said, you might consider a few defensive strategies, listed in order of increasing terror.
For the complete article visit USA Today
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