Riskiest Higher Education Bonds See Gains as Vaccines Rev Up

The expansion of the nation’s vaccination campaign to younger adults is bolstering the outlook for higher education bonds amid growing optimism for a more normal return to campuses in the fall. Source: Bloomberg The Bloomberg Barclays index of the riskiest municipal securities for education — which includes those sold for student housing and other facilities…

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Bond yields to stay put despite soaring global debt – Reuters poll

BENGALURU (Reuters) – Major sovereign bond yields, guided by central banks, will stay low despite soaring global debt levels and investors looking beyond fixed income securities for better returns, a Reuters poll found. Source: Reuters Following a November stocks rally, investors moved into risky assets, helping sovereign bond yields stay off March life-time lows as…

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Corporate Debt Issuers to Kick Off Sales With Up to $35 Billion

Historically, the majority of January debt sales comes from the financial sectors as banks try to fulfill their funding needs following earnings releases. Source: Bloomberg News (Bloomberg) — Sales of U.S. high-grade bonds will total between $30 billion and $35 billion next week, according to an informal survey of dealers at some of Wall Street’s…

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Electronic Bond Trading Gains Ground

 The buy and sell side are shifting towards a computerized trading platform, as electronic buying and selling technologies are performing with greater precision and efficiency. Source: Bloomberg Electronic trading in the $8 trillion U.S. corporate-bond market is beginning to heat up. A shift toward computerized buying and selling has taken place over several years, and the…

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Rethinking Junk Bonds

Federated Investors’ Mark Durbiano looks beyond the ratings for his high-yield fund—which also has a small slug of stocks. Source: Barron’s Investors tend to associate high-yield bonds with risky companies that have taken on more debt than they can handle, or whose better days are behind them. While the junk-bond universe does have its share…

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TDAM manager turns cautious on high-yield bonds

Amid narrowing spreads, non-investment-grade credits are expensive, cautions Greg Kocik of TD Asset Management. Source: Morningstar With high-yield-bond spreads over U.S. Treasuries approaching relatively low levels, and uncertainty about the Federal Reserve’s plans to start the process of unloading trillions of dollars of bonds from its balance sheet this fall, Greg Kocik argues that it…

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