Thursday 12 March 2009

You win some, you lose some

Bought: one June US T-Bond at 127-00 ½

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Off topic, Mark, I've just enabled comments on Choice Cuts and posted a reply to you there.

On topic, Ive been interested in investing in bonds, Hugh Hendry on Bloomberg, of whom I'm a great fan, has been banging on about them since December. So far my only foray was over Christmas and the new year when I did well in an iShare bund ETF, but I've not got the knowledge to trade bonds directly. Can you point me to a tutorial or site that explains all the dark mysteries?

Mark Wadsworth said...

I must admit, I've only ever bought and sold bond futures (a hobby I started again last week after a ten year break), I've never owned actual bonds. If you think that interest rates are going to go up, the last thing you should do is buy fixed rate bonds.

Anonymous said...

Many commentators are coming round to the view that bailouts and quantitative easing might cause inflation and kill bonds, and yet the latest insane wheeze of Nulab, the direct purchase of guilts with virtual money, promises to cause bonds to rise for the rest of this year.

I'm reluctantly coming round to the conclusion that things are going to get so bad that inflation won't be a factor for a long time. I'll go with Hugh Hendry on this one. Having said this, I've no plans to investing in bonds at the moment. I was happy with my iShare trade mentioned above, but as iShares are incorporated in the Irish Republic, I'm rather afraid to hang on to such an investment long term.

Bye the way, I'm not sure yet if my blog has risen from the dead. That post was a "one off" to learn how to link my charts to comments sections of trading blogs. We'll have to see if anything develops, but I don't think I'm clever enough, scratch that - I know I'm not clever enough, to host a trading blog myself.