Tag: treasury bonds

Best Performing ETF Group is Not What You Think

Posted on by Matt Thalman

With just two months to go in 2022, the best-performing group of Exchange Traded Funds year-to-date may not be what you would have expected it to be when we started the year.

After a strong bull market rally coming off the march 2020 Covid-19 dip, most investors would have assumed stocks, mainly big technology stocks, would again be the market leaders in 2022.

However, the market never ceases to surprise, and as hindsight is always in 20-20 vision, it feels like we all should have seen the signs that 2022 wasn't going to be a good year for stocks and another asset class was going to dominate.

What asset class are we speaking of? Bonds! Well, to be more specific, shorting Treasury Bonds.

Shorting longer-dated Treasury bonds has been, hands down, the best trade of 2022. Whether you use leveraged and-or inverse products or not, shorting Treasury Bills has produced great results in 2022.

For example, the ProShares UltraPro Short 20+ Year Treasury ETF (TTT) is up 176% year-to-date and more than 50% over the last three months. Direxion's version of the same ETF, the Direxion Daily 20+ Year Treasury Bear 3X Shares ETF (TMV), is also up 176% year-to-date. The ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury ETF (TBT), which is a 2X leveraged inverse fund, is up more than 100% year-to-date.

Even the funds that short the shorter term Treasury bills, the 7-10 year term bills, like the Direxion Daily 7-10 Year Treasury Bear 3X Share ETF (TYO) and the ProShares UltraShort 7-10 Year Treasury ETF (PST) are up 66% and 42% respectively.

If you had run a screener at the beginning of the year for non-leveraged and non-inverse funds because the risk involved with those products are not necessarily in your comfort zone, you still could have bought the Simplify Interest Rate Hedge ETF (PFIX). PFIX holds over-the-counter interest rate options and US Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities or TIPS, and still produced a return of around 100% year-to-date.

So you may be asking how and why shorting longer-dated Treasury bills produce solid results when interest rates, Treasury bills, and bond yields are climbing higher. Well, it is a little complicated on the surface but pretty simple once you understand how it all works. Continue reading "Best Performing ETF Group is Not What You Think" →

The Bond Yield Continuum And Gold

Posted on by Gary Tanashian

Have you heard the news? US Treasury bonds are skyrocketing as it turns out there is no inflation amid a global central bank NIRP-a-thon and race to the currency bottom. Going the other way, our 30yr Treasury yield Continuum is burrowing southward.

If you check out yesterday’s post you’ll see proof that the 2018 NFTRH view that people should tune out the bond experts instructing BOND BEAR MARKET!! was 100% on target.

But today the din is coming from the opposite pole. Everywhere you look on the financial websites it’s now about tanking yields, decelerating growth, trade war damage, and deflation. Here is the 30-year bond yield (TYX), which is front and center in this hysteria (click the charts below for the clearest view). That is one impulsive looking drop.

30 year bond yield

But just as we warned that the precious metals move was a “launch” (not a blow-off as some were calling it) in June because it was at the beginning rather than the end of an extended move, we note that TYX is impulsively dropping into a potential climax. Everybody is on the opposite side of the boat they were on in H2 2018. That would be the BOND BEAR MARKET!! side of the boat with experts Gross, Gundlach, and company. Now amidst the current Armageddon (the SPX is after all down a whole 4% from its all-time high, he said sarcastically) backdrop, it’s all BOND BULL MARKET!! all the time.

Wash…

Rinse…

Repeat… Continue reading "The Bond Yield Continuum And Gold" →

Why Is The Federal Reserve Not Selling?

Posted on by Lior Alkalay

Lior Alkalay - INO.com Contributor


On March 15th, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Janet Yellen, announced that the Fed would raise its target rate to 0.75-1.00% from 0.5-0.75%. Yellen also stressed, in a clear, hawkish tone, that the United States economy is doing well. After roughly three months of “hints” embedded in the Fed’s many statements, that news was hardly a surprise.

But in the same speech, Yellen stressed that the Fed was not ready to start selling the $4.5 trillion in the Treasury Notes, Treasury Bonds and mortgage papers that it holds on its balance sheet. Instead, Yellen stressed that the Fed sees rate hikes as the monetary tool. Further, rate hikes, as a tightening measure, must first be exhausted before the Fed would start selling those trillions. That was a clear retreat from the hints the Fed had dropped in the weeks which followed President Trump’s inauguration.

In fact, one could go so far as to say Yellen’s rhetoric, with respect to the Fed’s balance sheet, has been dovish; the way Yellen specifically emphasized how cautious the Fed is about the prospect of trimming its balance sheet singled that option out as some kind of a “bomb” that the Fed doesn't really want to drop and which could send markets into panic mode. If, indeed, the US economy doing so well, why then is the Fed not ready to roll back Quantitative Easing, a stimulus measure generally considered life support for the banking system? Continue reading "Why Is The Federal Reserve Not Selling?" →

The Government's Disastrous Reign over U.S. Money

Posted on by The INO.com Team

By Elliott Wave International

Very few people know that the United States did not create a monetary unit pegged to "buy" some amount of metal, as if the dollar were some kind of money independent of metal.

In 1792, Congress passed the U.S. Coinage Act, which defined a dollar as a coin containing 371.25 grains of silver and 44.75 grains of alloy. Congress did not say a dollar was worth that amount of metal; it was that amount of metal. A dollar, then, was a unit of weight, like a gram, ounce or pound. Since the alloy portion of the coin was nearly worthless, a dollar was essentially defined as 371.25 grains -- equal to 24.057 grams, or 0.7734 Troy oz. -- of pure silver. (15.43 grains = 1 gram, and 480 grains = 1 Troy ounce.)

In a nutshell, a dollar was equal to a bit more than 3/4 of an ounce of silver; or, in reverse, an ounce of silver was equal to $1.293.

The same act declared that a new coin, called an Eagle, would consist of 247.5 grains of gold and 22.5 grains of alloy. It valued this coin by law at ten dollars, meaning 3712.5 grains of silver. Continue reading "The Government's Disastrous Reign over U.S. Money" →

Stocks Peak One Year After Bonds (History Set to Repeat?)

Posted on by The INO.com Team

Financial parallels between the 1920s and today

By Elliott Wave International

When the financial media mentions the late 1920s, they usually mean the 1929 stock market top. But today's investors can also learn from what happened in 1928. That was the year that the bond market topped, while commodities peaked even sooner.

You can see this for yourself in a chart published in the September 2013 issue of Robert Prechter's Elliott Wave Theorist.

In the deflationary collapse of 1929-32, commodities fell
from lower peaks, not higher peaks; stocks fell
from all-time highs down to the bottom; and bond
prices fell from an all-time high a year earlier.

The Elliott Wave Theorist, July-August,
2013

These markets could see a similar outcome in the near future: Commodities peaked in 2008, while Treasury bonds topped in 2012. The high in the Dow Industrials remains December 31, 2013. Continue reading "Stocks Peak One Year After Bonds (History Set to Repeat?)" →