SO YOU WANNA SPECULATE ON BONDS?

The 'tourist's first part of why buying fixed-income is a poor risk/reward and why the bond market might be wrong again

Before COVID, trading bonds was easy. For forty years, interest rates fell. It didn’t matter whether you owned the front of the curve (Fed Funds) or the long-end (U.S. 30-yr Treasury bonds), from 1980 to 2020, it was a one-way ticket lower (in terms of yields).

Obviously yields didn’t go straight down. There were brief periods when yields rose, but if y…