Value in the short(er) end

Good morning. Ugly day for stocks yesterday. The blame was pinned on a bad reading on the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index. Feels more like a market looking for an excuse to sell, though. And for good or bad, the market half-life of economic data is measured in hours at this point. Email us with measured, sensible, long-term views: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com.

Value in short end credit?

Working on yesterday’s letter about long-maturity corporate credit, I chatted with Jim Sarni, a principal at Payden & Rygel, a good friend of Unhedged. He pounded the table a bit, saying that I had things backwards: the real opportunity was in the short to middle bit of the curve.

“It’s appealing from the simple standpoint of, where the hell do I put my money right now, whether as an institution or a private investor,” Jim says. “And it can appeal no matter what view a person has — that we are facing Armageddon, or we are going to be fine.”

The argument goes like this. A portfolio of investment-grade corporates with an average duration around 2.5 years provides a yield of up to 4 to 4.5 per cent. “Doing the math on the back of a napkin,” Sarni says, “that means Treasury yields can move up another 180 basis points or so before total return to the investor turns negative.” 

The two-year Treasury, roughly mirroring the expected peak for the fed funds rate, is yielding 3.1 per cent. Suppose that does move up to, say, 4.6 per cent. Now your basket of mid-duration corporates are barely at break even. But under those circumstances, equities and longer-duration bonds will probably be doing a lot worse than break even. Losing only a little money might have you feeling pretty good. And if rates fall (or spreads tighten), there will be bonus returns along the way.

CPI, of course, is running at 8 per cent or so, which makes a yield of half a lot less enticing. Sarni is undeterred: “You’ve gotta be somewhere. Eight per cent is not a long-term number. It’s 8 per cent coming down. Over the duration of this portfolio inflation won’t be close to 8 per cent — north of 3, south of 4, maybe?” Sarni thinks that, given the palpable slowing in the economy when the Fed is only halfway to its anticipated destination, the bet is tilted towards lower inflation and rates. And if the Fed pushes the economy into a hard landing, you could do worse than owning the debt of companies “that are going to weather the storm just fine”.

For a proxy of the kind of portfolio that Sarni is talking about, you can look at, for example, the Ice BofA 1-5 year corporate ex-144a index (yield to worst 4.25 per cent, average duration 2.7 years); or the Bloomberg US corporate bond 1-5 year index (yield 4.33 per cent, duration three years). Here is the price and spread of the latter over the past year:

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Keen to hear from our readers in the bond business whether they also see value in this bit of the curve.

After 60/40, redux

We’ve been asking around these parts what the next 60/40 portfolio — 60 per cent stocks for growth, 40 per cent bonds for stability — should look like if we are moving into a world of persistently higher inflation. In such a world, the glorious negative correlation of bonds and stocks of the last 30 years or so may be nothing but a memory.

We call this replacement, affectionately, the dumb portfolio. It has to generate decent returns over a long horizon, require little active oversight and can’t be too complex. There also have to be enough assets for a broad swath of investors to pile in. Inflation-linked I-bonds, for example, have less than $60bn in circulation. They don’t fit.

We noted last time that commodities looked better as an inflation hedge than as a way to grow capital. A few readers pointed out that we used an index that understates how well commodities have done by focusing only on raw price performance. They rightly suggested we try a total return index instead, which includes the extra yield earned by the collateral, usually Treasury bills, that must be held against commodity futures. The difference is noticeable:

Still, this is not a resounding growth story. The latest rally puts us back to early 2000s levels. The last sustained period of appreciation before that, from the early 1980s to early 2000s, saw commodities grow 531 per cent, versus over 2,000 per cent for the S&P 500. Unless you believe a commodity supercycle is coming (lots of people do!), expect a growth trade-off for the diversification benefit.

Another possibility is publicly listed infrastructure projects. Tim Robson, spooked by inflation a year ago, wrote that he cut out his 35 per cent bond allocation to add infrastructure and has liked the results:

This construct has performed as I hoped with significant gains and yield from this infra allocation offsetting my equity losses since the turn of the year.

In the UK this shift was relatively easy to achieve by buying a selection of UK listed infrastructure investment trusts.

Several readers suggested getting exposure to factors such as value or momentum. Here’s Caleb Johnson, formerly at AQR and now at Harbor Macro Strategies:

Investors don’t just need exposure to more asset classes, like commodities, they need exposure to factor and style premia. Yes, this has typically been available mainly through private investments . . . but they are also available through “liquid alts” in the form of mutual funds and [exchange traded funds] that non-accredited investors can access as well.

Consider a style factor like momentum. A commodities ETF treats an entire asset class like a monolith and is only going to give an investor passive exposure to it. But a factor-oriented fund is going to do more than offer long-only exposure, allowing investors to profit from exposure to individual markets across asset classes even when they are going down in price.

Along similar lines, Philip Seager at Capital Fund Management wrote that trend following, factor investing’s close cousin, looks promising:

Not only is it a diversifier (on average zero correlated with equities) but also has mechanical features that make it a hedge against long, drawn out, protracted moves down in equities (see the 2008 crisis for example). We have also shown recently that TF as applied to commodities provides an effective hedge against inflation (end 2021 and 2022 year-to-date demonstrate this). On top of all this because of its long term nature and exposure coming from very liquid futures contracts it also scales very well.

We don’t deny the proven power of trend following and factor investing (when done right) but wondered whether the underlying concept might be too complex, even if you can buy it in an ETF. In general, the point of the dumb portfolio is maximum returns given minimum trust in your fund manager. Factor investing asks for a lot of trust.

Paul O’Brien, a 60/40 optimist, suggested a simpler change:

The key premise of the 60/40 is not the negative correlation of stocks and bonds. It is the low covariance of stocks and bonds. Bonds are less volatile than stocks and so will diversify a stock portfolio (lower portfolio volatility) even if the correlation is [positive].

Rather than ditching the 60/40, investors may want to hold lower-duration bonds, or [Treasury inflation-protected securities].

Could building the inflation-proofed dumb portfolio be as easy as take 60/40, sprinkle in some Tips and small caps, and call it a day? (Ethan Wu)

One good read

Is the Fed tightening faster than it thinks?