Let me share a post that I put up last night on my paid sites about when the great bull market in bonds will finally turn into the great bear market in bonds.
Yes, that’s sites. Plural. I’ve been busy building a second site, JugglingWithKnives.com, that parallels the focus of my book Juggling With Knives on volatility.If you want everything that appears on this free site plus my posts on volatility and access to a new Volatility Portfolio (which also appears on JubakAM.com, I’d note) that I’ve just started, subscribe to that site for $79 a year. (Or buy a copy of my book and read it until you find the secret code that will let you get on JugglingWithKnives.com for free for a year.) If you want everything I write on every topic, my paid $199 site, JubakAM.com is still the place to go.
All of which brings me to last night’s post.
Is this it? Is this finally it? I asked: The point that marks the end of the great bull market in bonds and the beginning of a years-long bear market in U.S. bonds.
Investment managers and economists have been waiting for the transition point for years. Logically the great decline in yields and the great surge in prices that began in the Reagan administration has to come to an end. Yields can fall from 15.32%–where they were in September 1981–to 1.53%–where they were in July 2012–as the Federal Reserve first wrings double-digit inflation out of the economy and then pursues an easy money, asset-friendly, fast economic growth strategy.
But once they’re at 1.53%, yields can’t fall another 13 or 14 percentage points. It’s mathematically impossible–even the European Central Bank couldn’t engineer interest rates that negative.
But every time interest rates drop below 2% and then look like they’re finally ready to climb steadily higher, devastating bond prices as they rise–they haven’t. In the summer of 2016 bond yields, instead of climbing from that 1.53% in 2012 actually hit a new all-time low of 1.36%. Investment managers who had bet on interest rates marching steadily upwards–and who might have gone short bonds on the theory that rising rates would deliver a steady stream of profits to traders who bet that bond prices would decline got killed.
This time, the bond gurus are saying (some of them are the guys who got it real wrong last time), it’s different.
The post then continues with the history of recent volatility in the Treasury market and concludes with my take on when shorting Treasuries will finally make sense. (Hint: Not yet. Even if the Fed, as expected, raises interest rates tomorrow.)
Anyway that’s what I’m working on at my subscription sites, JugglingWithKnives.com and JubakAM.com.
I think there’s some value to you in passing on the direction of my thinking about the market on those sites. Hope so anyway.
Of course, there’s an ulterior motive to sharing this with you: If you decide that you’d like more of my thoughts on the market in my JugglingWithKnives.com or JubakAM.com posts, I’m hoping that you’ll subscribe to my sites for either $79 or $199.
