By Ted Schwartz
I am a long term believer that good investing is a balancing act of evaluating how much you expect to make from an investment and how much risk is involved in trying to make that return. I believe this is a dynamic and changing calculation. When investments are expensive, your risk will increase and your expected return will drop. Not a good idea!
So, I was shocked to see the money flows for 2012 in mutual funds. About a hundred billion dollars went out of Equity Funds and into Intermediate Term Bond Funds. The expected returns for these bond funds are near an all-time low at this point. Their coupons (the amount paid to you in interest) are often about the same as the expected rate of inflation. So, in real terms you get nothing from that component. The only way you could make any money on the valuation side would be for interest rates to decline even further. This is not impossible, but there is not much room for further rate decline. History says rates will rise, the only question is when. That means the potential returns on these investments are very, very small indeed.
The risks? Due to rates being so low, relatively small increases in rates would likely cause relatively large declines in bond prices. A one percent increase in interest rates (still leaving us well below normal) would likely cause a loss of 5% or more in bond values. A two percent change would likely elevate this to double digits.
Why take the risk of these losses to potentially have such a small return on your investment? That is the question for which I cannot find a good answer. Anyone?