In response to COVID-19 and its disruptive impact on the credit market, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced the creation of the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF) and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) on March 23, 2020, to support the functioning of the credit market. The PMCCF provides a funding backstop for corporate…
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Investing legend Marty Zweig famously declared, “don’t fight the Fed.” With the Fed now buying fixed income ETFs and fund flows of index-based ETFs surging, Marty’s advice is proving timely. In this blog post, we review key index-based product performance leading up to the Fed’s intervention and detail the ETF fund flows that followed. Back…
As of July 5, 2018, the S&P/LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan 100 Index returned 2% YTD, compared with the S&P U.S. High Yield Corporate Bond Index’s return of -0.29%. In 2018, U.S. high-yield performance has experienced two rather sizeable negative returns—back-to-back declines in February (-1.05%) and March (-0.45%)—followed by a turnaround in April (see Exhibit 1)….
In one of my previous blog posts, we demonstrated that high yield bonds exhibited a strong negative correlation with VIX and an even stronger one with VIX futures, which comes mostly from down markets. This prompted us to think that VIX futures may hold tail-risk hedging opportunities for high yield bond portfolios. In this blog,…
This Wednesday, the Fed announced that they would begin raising rates, a decision that has left many investors with questions about how they will fare in this changing environment. Knowing that conventional, fixed-rate securities sometimes lose value when interest rates increase has some investors looking to floating-rate securities instead. Floating-rate securities are designed to mitigate…
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