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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
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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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Occupying The Bond Market |
Seeking Alpha - Dec. 15, 2011 - by Christopher Keith
Agree with them or not, the “Occupy” crowd has garnered a lot of attention.
To many, including me, some of their positions seem inconsistent with reality and their own behavior. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have some valid points to make, or that I am oblivious and insensitive to the predicament that many Americans face. These are challenging times, indeed.
Treading on more familiar terrain, the bond market is experiencing its own sort of Occupy movement. Large, institutional investors have staged a protest (boycott) of almost anything that smells of risk. You may have seen the terms, “risk-on” and “risk-off” used to explain what’s happening in many investment markets.
In the bond market, risk-on/risk-off refers to trading that, en masse, pushes Treasury prices higher (risk-off) or lower (risk-on). Lately, whenever the news flashes more troubles in Europe, investors take risk-off and flee to the safety of Treasuries. The flight to quality comes in the face of legitimate fears of a major sovereign default. When the news brightens, investors are willing to take on more risk and Treasury prices decline.
In essence, the sovereign bond market has occupied the world’s financial markets and it’s become a guessing game as to which European nation will be the first to default.
Like the police that finally reclaimed parks and plazas from the Occupy crowd, the Federal Reserve and five other central banks, all charged in one way or another with safeguarding economies and financial markets, stepped in at the end of November. Along with central banks of Switzerland, Canada, England, Japan and the euro zone, the Fed agreed to lower interest rates in the global currency markets used by large banks to maintain liquidity. The news spurred stock markets around the globe to gains of 4% or better for the day.
Markets are supposed move higher on good news. Yet, while the immediate implications of the central banks’ intervention was positive, the inconsistency is that the action was taken because European banks’ problems were growing clearer, or bigger. To me, this is simply financial engineering to provide a quick fix. The intervention did very little to change the structural problems that got banks into this mess in the first place.
Sovereign bond yields tell the tale. Yields on Greece’s debt have been climbing for months and now that contagion is spreading; most recently to Italy. The year began with Italy’s 10-year sovereign bonds yielding 4.4%. Yet, while rates have fallen in the U.S., Italian yields soared as high as 7.4% in early November. They ended the month at 7.0%, sending Italy’s borrowing costs skyrocketing at a time that it has hundreds of billions of dollars of debt coming due in the near future; much of which will need to be refinanced with new bonds. It almost certainly will get worse before it gets better.
For the complete article.
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| Stuff to look at |
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| BondsOnline Advisor |
Income Security Recommendation January 2013 Issue.
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