Should We Appreciate Bonds? Part II

Cocktail parties for charities often reveal more investment concerns than those expressed in an organization’s formal meetings with investment advisers or investment committee members. In this age of unusually high fixed income yields and low total returns from common stocks, taking advantage of spreads for capital appreciation, not primarily income and capital preservation, can be unnerving. The question of whether this new approach is a sound one for a fiduciary has been expressed by members of several charity boards and committees.

As many of our regular readers know “Monday Morning Musings” is written largely on Sunday evening. As some also may know, on Sundays I spend time with Barron’s, the oldest and (and in my view) the finest statistical package of data. I also use the weekend to peruse my old mutual fund analysis reports, now produced by Lipper, Inc. With these resources in hand I can more fully address the propriety of using credits, in this case corporate bonds, to make money for fiduciary accounts.

Each week Barron’s publishes a list of the 40 corporate bonds with highest estimated trading volume for the week. One of the most useful columns in this display is the estimated spread between the current yield and those of US Treasuries of similar maturities. As there are all kinds of buyers of bonds in the secondary market, these spreads vary widely from the lowest, 79 basis points (0.79% of 1.00%) to 1175 basis points. The suggested strategy is to buy investment quality corporate bonds whose spreads with treasuries are 300 to 400 basis points above a more “normal” spread of 100 basis points. In examining the April 17th list, I found there were seven bonds with a 400 point spread, and eight with a 500 point spread. The proposed strategy presumes a mini-portfolio of about four bonds, so there are a sufficient number of candidates in the most liquid of cases.

A more difficult question as to what is the “normal” spread, sent me to look up the data from the year-end Lipper Fixed Income Fund Performance Analysis Report Certificate Edition for 2006. The data is somewhat like comparing apples with oranges as to their weight and caloric content. Nevertheless, this was all that was available to me over the weekend. There are three distinct mutual fund peer groups which can be compared: General US Treasury Bond Funds, Corporate Bond Funds - A Rated and Corporate Bond Funds – BBB rated. As distinct from the proposed strategy that only includes four issues, each bond fund in the peer group may own more than 100 individual bonds. Each fund only has to assure the SEC and my old firm that the majority of its holdings meet the minimum credit rating in the title of the peer group assigned to them.

Another complication is that funds have expenses which are deducted before the yield and total returns are calculated. By adding back the average total expense ratio to the reported yield, we get the average gross yield in the average portfolio. As of the end of March 2009, the adjusted yield spreads compared with treasuries were 246 basis points for the “A” rated Bond Funds, and 327 basis points for the “BBB” rated Funds. Using the same approach for year-end 2006, the spreads were 174 basis points for the “A” rated and 231 basis points for the “BBB” rated funds. Therefore there appears to be the historic possibility of a 96 basis point pick up using funds alone, which leaves no room for security selection skill.

While we professional investors fixate on relative performance and yields, our clients spend actual dollars, not basis points, so absolute return becomes critical to them.

At the time when one expects to use an investment, a decline in the absolute is extremely painful. So what can go wrong with the proposed strategy? The credit quality of the owned bonds can decline. (In theory, this is answered by the chosen manager following both the issued bond and the underlying stock on a day-to-day basis.) The next major risk, and one that I feel is much more likely, is that inflation and not deflation becomes the problem, causing investors to demand and get higher yields on new issues of US Treasuries. The higher yields on the new issues will drive the yields on existing bonds higher and therefore prices lower. While the spreads could questionably narrow, the prices of the bonds will decline under those circumstances. (One possible counter argument is that a balanced portfolio with a majority of equity investments, often drive equity prices higher initially.)

The fundamental question facing the fiduciary is whether the odds on tightening in the near term future far outweigh the longer term risk of specific credit problems and/or rapid inflation. My attitude is that the strategy could work well in the hands of a skilled active manager of selected bonds, but not a strategy to be recommended for individual investors or most institutional investors. The next cocktail party questions should be around demonstrable skills, not investment policies.

(This post is a follow up to my March 30, 2009 Blog entitled,
“Should We Appreciate Bonds?”)