Weekend Reading – Bonds Rollercoaster: Fear, Greed, and the Search for Safe Havens
Weekend Reading is a collection of Investment Research and Lifestyle topics from all corners of the Web.We source the highest quality insights from Wall Street and Main Street that you may apply to your investment process. Unlike the rest of Bankeronwheels.com, this series is provided without additional guidance. As usual, everything is to be used at your own risk. Below is the type of content we shortlist.
Invest Wisely section is dedicated to research on how to invest for the Long Run using Passive Investment Strategies. Read Topics related to (i) Portfolio Construction and Asset Allocation (ii) Acting wisely by avoiding behavioural traps and also (iii) publications that help understand how financial markets work.
Active Investing section relates to improving your knowledge about active investing. If you decide to sin, then sin only a little. Given ample evidence, combined active bets should be ideally a relatively small fraction of your portfolio. This section also includes Sustainable Investing. You can invest in a Socially Responsible way, but there are many ESG traps. Learn how to invest sustainably, and what it means for expected returns, with our definitive guide to sustainable investing.
Personal Finance section is dedicated to UK and European Products. It can also touch on other European jurisdictions outside the Euro-zone.
- Recommeded Reading
- Youtube (Required watch time)
- Podcast (Listening Time)
- Academic Research - May require intermediate/advanced knowledge
- Noteworthy Twitter Thread
'People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures
INVEST WISELY
CONSTRUCT YOUR PORTFOLIO
No time to risk- how to pick a bond ETF for the long run (Bankeronwheels.com)
Bond Yields are at decade high, but Bonds are also a shield for your medium and long-term portfolios, including when deflation strikes. This makes them a mandatory component for any portfolio.
Explore how investment horizon, geographical diversification, risk & return tradeoff & the specific ETF characteristics are important pillars of selecting a long term Bond ETF for your portfolio.
We also have a list of Best ETFs.
Have Bonds Finally Reached Escape Velocity (Discipline Funds)
In the 1970s overnight interest rates went from a low of 3% to a high of 20%. This was an especially tough time to be a bond investor as the surge in interest rates caused short-term principal losses and prolonged real losses. But there’s also an interesting and important lesson from the 1970s – higher bond yields create a sort of escape velocity at some point where the interest payments offset the interest rate risk
Read more on Discipline Funds
- Don't fret about lower bond prices. Bonds mature at par (Fortunes & Frictions)
- Sovereign Bonds: In search of safe havens (Aswath Damodaran)
- Keep calm and consider bonds (ETF Stream)
- Investing for immortals - how to invest if you have a long term horizon (Joachim Klement)
- The Cake/Fruit Salad Theory of Asset Allocation (Oblivious Investor)
UNDERSTAND FINANCIAL MARKETS
- Everything & Everyone Underperforms Eventually (A Wealth of Common Sense)
- Four Reasons Bond Yields Are Rising (Morningstar)
- The perils of long-term forecasts — GMO edition (FT.com - click on the first link)
- Visualizing $156 Trillion in U.S. Assets, by Generation (Visual Capitalist)
- The 4 big structural forces holding back China's economy (Bloomberg - 45 min)
- The investor sentiment cycle (Monevator)
HOW TO INVEST
From Tibet to California - 8 investing lessons from cycling the world (Bankeronwheels.com)
Some cycling experiences profoundly changed me, but also my way of looking at investing. You may think that spending over a decade on Wall Street would teach me more about successful investing than cycling. Surprisingly, Wise Money is more about perspective than technicals. Here are 8 Investing lessons I learned from Cycling the World.
Active Investing
FACTOR investing
discretionary investing
7 key valuation lessons from Aswath Damodaran (Daniel)
Aswath Damodaran is the ‘Dean of Valuation.’
For almost four decades, he has been teaching valuation at NYU. He also teaches millions of people online.
Here are 7 Key Valuation Lessons from him
Read more on Twitter
ALTERNATIVE ASSET CLASSES
WALL STREET
SUSTAINABLE investing
crypto
Looking at Bitcoin within a 60/40 portfolio. (Morningstar)
Bitcoin Index posted a 76.4% return through July 2023 in defiance of the gloomy narratives that haunt the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The trusty balanced portfolio has also beaten expectations as of late. So far in 2023, risk has paid handsomely. That fact may leave many investors wondering whether to add some extra firepower to their portfolio in the form of an allocation to bitcoin.
Read more on Morningstar
BAD BETS
FROM Bankeronwheels.com
Beat Most Investors with FREE ETF Master Guides
- Get Rich, Slowly but Surely – We designed Equity ETF selection frameworks and then picked the best funds in each category, so you don’t have to.
- Become a Passive Investing Ninja – Have no mercy for Financial Institutions. Cut TERs, Taxes, FX Fees and Invisible Costs.
- Licence to Yield – Which Bond ETFs for your goals? How do price change? Should you hedge currencies?
- Don’t get fooled by Wall Street – ESG Ratings are not designed to protect the planet. Adjusted for risk, ESG ETFs will also inevitably underperform. So how can you invest Sustainably?
From Bankeronwheels.com
Beat Most Investors with FREE ETF Master Guides
- Get Rich, Slowly but Surely – We designed Equity ETF selection frameworks and then picked the best funds in each category, so you don’t have to.
- Become a Passive Investing Ninja – Have no mercy for Financial Institutions. Cut TERs, Taxes, FX Fees and Invisible Costs.
- Licence to Yield – Which Bond ETFs for your goals? How do prices change? Should you hedge currencies?
- Don’t get fooled by Wall Street – ESG Ratings are not designed to protect the planet. Adjusted for risk, ESG ETFs will also inevitably underperform. So how can you invest Sustainably?
PERSONAL FINANCE
Wealth Management
Early Retirement
While the thought of a mini-retirement can leave you feeling unstructured from your usual 9-5, it can usher in more time for hobbies, side hustles, or even new jobs! So, while your journey to FI may be filled with rules and guidelines set in place to help you reach your FI goal, remember that there is no harm in taking an active rest in order to restructure your goals and re-motivate you!
FINANCIAL PRODUCTS
COST OF LIVING
OUR Community
Question of the week
From Bankeronwheels.com
We Help You Avoid Costly Investing Mistakes.
Most coaching participants come from the EU or the UK.
But we have consistent demand from all around the world. We provided coaching sessions to individual investors stretching from Argentina to New Zealand, or Guatemala to Japan.
A significant part of our clients are professionals in the Tech sector, Lawyers or Doctors that want to avoid costly mistakes when investing.
We also coach 25-30 year old young professionals that want to maximise assets for early retirement. We also have a large group of entrepreneurs that e.g. receive large lump sums after selling their company and want to invest it in financial markets. We speak to Crypto millionaires that want to reduce their risks.
Finally, some of our coaching clients are in their 40s or 50s and want to set up customised, income-producing portfolios or create Bond ladders for their retirement.
Most of the coached investors are in the 25–60 year old range.
Yes, some of our coaching clients have shared reviews on Google.
Some considerations are included below. For more details, consult your regulator’s website.
A financial coach is:
- Trained but not regulated
- Skilled at reviewing your overall financial situation and goals
- Able to help you develop a financial plan to achieve those goals
- Happy to discuss the pros and cons of various financial products but can’t recommend a specific one for you
- Comfortable working with anyone, whatever their situation
- Going to charge for their time
A financial adviser is:
- Regulated and authorised by the regulator to recommend specific products to clients or is independent and able to offer ‘whole of market’ solutions
- Often, going to charge an annual management fee, typically 1-2% of their client’s assets with initial fees on top.
We are proud to say that our coaching service has empowered a number of clients to reconsider their financial advisers’ offerings. From our clients’ feedback, in a number of cases, clients were overcharged, and offered unsuitable products, often due to conflicts of interest. However, this is not a rule. The best choice between a financial coach and adviser depends on an individual’s unique circumstances, including their financial literacy, time availability, comfort with managing their finances, and complexity of their financial situation.
Beginners often ask us:
- How do I reach my goals – What investments do I need to take into consideration for e.g. Taking a Sabbatical, buying a House or saving for Early Retirement?
- When should I invest – I fear that investing a lump sum in this market may have a negative impact on my returns. How can timing of buying ETFs affect my performance?
- How do I Invest – What are the pro and cons of investing with a Bank? Why should I diversify brokers?
- What should I consider investing in – What are some risks of portfolio diversifiers like Gold or Crypto?
- Avoiding Extra Costs – I have shortlisted a few ETFs, can you help me to compare them before I decide which one to buy?
- Benchmarking – What are educated investors doing in a similar situation to mine?
We are flexible. For example, answering some of these questions could help you avoid very costly mistakes:
- Challenging My Portfolio – Here is my portfolio – what am I missing? What could derail my strategy?
- Accelerating My Understanding – What are inflation linked Bonds? How are they different to Nominal Bond ETFs? What makes them outperform? Why do some investors add small cap value stocks to their portfolios? I want to exclude Tobacco companies from my portfolio – what are my options? What is Factor Investing?
- Simplifying Portfolio Maintenance – How can I diversify my investments? What is historically highly correlated so that I can consider removing it to keep my portfolio simple? How do I perform rebalancing? Does frequency matter?
- Reducing Risks – I want to understand the risks of investments – what are the different measures and how does it impact me? What are the risks of different types of brokerage accounts?
- Understanding the Impact of Recent Events – How do recent events impact my portfolio? What can I do to protect my savings from shocks?
- Investing Goals – I am investing for a specific goal e.g. Early Retirement, what is the research saying about e.g. the amount I need to have accumulated, how much can I withdraw annually? What are some calculators available and how to run them? What are the assumptions/shortcomings of these models?
- Comparing Equivalent ETFs – I have certain constraints in my tax-wrapper and can only select certain funds (e.g. I live in France and limited to specific synthetic ETFs). Which ETF characteristics should I pay attention to?
From Bankeronwheels.com
Get personal help To Set up your portfolio
We Help You Avoid Costly Investing Mistakes.
Sometimes individual sessions are very helpful to get past your investing concerns. Our readers asked us to create coaching sessions. And we’re proud to say, that some of them even ditched their Financial Advisors, after experiencing the value we provide.
Most coaching participants come from the EU or the UK.
But we have consistent demand from all around the world. We provided coaching sessions to individual investors stretching from Argentina to New Zealand, or Guatemala to Japan.
A significant part of our clients are professionals in the Tech sector, Lawyers or Doctors that want to avoid costly mistakes when investing.
We also coach 25-30 year old young professionals that want to maximise assets for early retirement. We also have a large group of entrepreneurs that e.g. receive large lump sums after selling their company and want to invest it in financial markets. We speak to Crypto millionaires that want to reduce their risks.
Finally, some of our coaching clients are in their 40s or 50s and want to set up customised, income-producing portfolios or create Bond ladders for their retirement.
Most of the coached investors are in the 25–60 year old range.
Yes, some of our coaching clients have shared reviews on Google.
Some considerations are included below. For more details, consult your regulator’s website.
A financial coach is:
- Trained but not regulated
- Skilled at reviewing your overall financial situation and goals
- Able to help you develop a financial plan to achieve those goals
- Happy to discuss the pros and cons of various financial products but can’t recommend a specific one for you
- Comfortable working with anyone, whatever their situation
- Going to charge for their time
A financial adviser is:
- Regulated and authorised by the regulator to recommend specific products to clients or is independent and able to offer ‘whole of market’ solutions
- Often, going to charge an annual management fee, typically 1-2% of their client’s assets with initial fees on top.
We are proud to say that our coaching service has empowered a number of clients to reconsider their financial advisers’ offerings. From our clients’ feedback, in a number of cases, clients were overcharged, and offered unsuitable products, often due to conflicts of interest. However, this is not a rule. The best choice between a financial coach and adviser depends on an individual’s unique circumstances, including their financial literacy, time availability, comfort with managing their finances, and complexity of their financial situation.
Beginners often ask us:
- How do I reach my goals – What investments do I need to take into consideration for e.g. Taking a Sabbatical, buying a House or saving for Early Retirement?
- When should I invest – I fear that investing a lump sum in this market may have a negative impact on my returns. How can timing of buying ETFs affect my performance?
- How do I Invest – What are the pro and cons of investing with a Bank? Why should I diversify brokers?
- What should I consider investing in – What are some risks of portfolio diversifiers like Gold or Crypto?
- Avoiding Extra Costs – I have shortlisted a few ETFs, can you help me to compare them before I decide which one to buy?
- Benchmarking – What are educated investors doing in a similar situation to mine?
We are flexible. For example, answering some of these questions could help you avoid very costly mistakes:
- Challenging My Portfolio – Here is my portfolio – what am I missing? What could derail my strategy?
- Accelerating My Understanding – What are inflation linked Bonds? How are they different to Nominal Bond ETFs? What makes them outperform? Why do some investors add small cap value stocks to their portfolios? I want to exclude Tobacco companies from my portfolio – what are my options? What is Factor Investing?
- Simplifying Portfolio Maintenance – How can I diversify my investments? What is historically highly correlated so that I can consider removing it to keep my portfolio simple? How do I perform rebalancing? Does frequency matter?
- Reducing Risks – I want to understand the risks of investments – what are the different measures and how does it impact me? What are the risks of different types of brokerage accounts?
- Understanding the Impact of Recent Events – How do recent events impact my portfolio? What can I do to protect my savings from shocks?
- Investing Goals – I am investing for a specific goal e.g. Early Retirement, what is the research saying about e.g. the amount I need to have accumulated, how much can I withdraw annually? What are some calculators available and how to run them? What are the assumptions/shortcomings of these models?
- Comparing Equivalent ETFs – I have certain constraints in my tax-wrapper and can only select certain funds (e.g. I live in France and limited to specific synthetic ETFs). Which ETF characteristics should I pay attention to?
DESIGN YOUR LIFESTYLE
Personal Development
Justin Gary is an award-winning designer, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Stone Blade Entertainment and creator of the innovative and award-winning Ascension deck-building game series. Explore the path less travelled, the phenomenon of magic, how analytical people can become creative people & much more!
- A journey through the treasures and trophies phase of life. (Indeedably)
- Are you are a part of the cult of never enough? If your children aren't already telling you, your body may well be (Morningstar)
- Textbook view of money and happiness (Humble Dollar)
- Your memory is lying to you. About handwritten journalling. (Infinite Loop)
Health & Wellness
CAREERS
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TECH AND SCIENCE
Travel
Cycling in Japan - 2 secret maps, best islands & seasons (Bankeronwheels.com)
Between 2019 and 2023, I spent close to a year in Japan. I cycled over 4,000 km from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Here are some tips on how you can make the best of your trip to the country of the rising sun. When to go, where to go (to avoid the touristy parts), navigation, avoiding natural disasters, and travelling cheaply.
Here are the best tips.
From Bankeronwheels.com
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