Generous Bond Yields Prove There Is an Alternative to Stocks

Return with us to ancient times, when dinosaurs ruled, at least in technology terms. It was early 2007, when Blackberries were in everybody’s mitts and the first iPhone hadn’t yet gone on sale, let al...

How to Build a Bond Ladder for Income

While stock prices typically rise and fall from year to year, bond prices have historically been quite stable. Yet 2022 is shaping up to be a year of infamy for fixed income. Since bond prices move in...

This Is a Good Time to Buy Short-Term Bonds

Until recently, short-term bonds were a yield wasteland: A two-year Treasury note yielded 0.21% a year ago and just 1% in January. Today, the yield is over 3.8% and could soon touch 4%, thanks in good...

The Inverted Yield Curve Is Back. What Investors Need to Know.

Text size The Federal Reserve building in Washington. Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg The Treasury yield curve continues to widen, with no signs that the trend is nearing an end. The Federal Reserve raised t...

The Stock Market Rallied on Hopes That Rate Hikes Will Soon Wind Down

Text size While the markets and many consumers are worried about inflation, other people, like these skaters at Rockefeller Center in New York, are still spending. Richard Levine/Alamy Markets can sta...

Municipal Bonds Are Down So Much That They’re Buys Again

Text size Al Drago/Bloomberg A funny thing happened in the past week, as news emerged of inflation hitting a four-decade high. A few strategists started looking a bit more positively on bonds, or at l...

Missed the Dip in Stocks? Where to Find Yields of 3% to 6%.

I sneezed, and missed the buying opportunity in stocks. The S&P 500 was down 13% at one point this year. It ended the first quarter with a loss of just 4.6%, including dividends. But all of the ba...

Inverted Yield Curve Could Be Sending a Bogus Recession Warning

No topic has dominated the investment conversation lately as much as the yield curve. While it’s an arcane matter to most folks, we in the financial sphere have been thrown into a tizzy by this indica...

Cash-Rich Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, and Alphabet Should Gain From Higher Rates

Text size Apple could be earning $4 billion more on its cash by 2023 Sean Gallup/Getty Images With its enormous cash reserves now earning next to nothing, Berkshire Hathaway could be one of the bigger...

Warren Buffett’s Preferred Equity Allocation Is 100%

Warren Buffett’s preferred equity allocation is 100%, and he has adopted that strategy both personally and at Berkshire Hathaway in a way that is radically different from other companies in the insura...

Inflation, Interest-Rate Jitters, and Putin Are Brewing a Fierce Storm for the Stock Market

Text size A Ukrainian soldier in the Kharkiv region near the Russian border. Will Putin pull the trigger on an invasion? Sergey Bobok/AFP/Getty Images We were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big ...

The Jobs Report Reveals a Booming Labor Market. Here’s Where Interest Rates Are Headed.

Text size President Joe Biden speaking about the January jobs report. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Good news for Main Street, not so good news for Wall Street. Once again, a booming labor market is like...

Forget About Inflation. Contrarians Expect a Recession and a Drop in Bond Yields.

“Something that everyone knows isn’t worth knowing,” as the famed financier Bernard Baruch once observed. And so I was reminded by a long discourse in the New York Times this past week on why bond yie...

Worried About Inflation? Check Out This 7% Treasury Savings Bond.

Text size The Treasury Building Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images One of the best deals for savers now are Treasury Series I savings bonds now paying a 7.12% interest rate. The savings bonds, available el...