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Valicious
Aug 16, 2010
Oops, wrong thread

Valicious fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Mar 17, 2021

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SlapActionJackson
Jul 27, 2006

H110Hawk posted:

Other countries would just tell your employer they MUST hold the marginal rate of your income at the time you receive it and this wouldn't be a thing.

My employer doesn't know my marginal tax rate, they can only guess at it. I don't want to give them enough info to calculate it accurately, either. Not every complexity in the US tax code is intuit's fault.

spwrozek
Sep 4, 2006

Sail when it's windy

SlapActionJackson posted:

My employer doesn't know my marginal tax rate, they can only guess at it. I don't want to give them enough info to calculate it accurately, either. Not every complexity in the US tax code is intuit's fault.

It is because they lobby so hard to make the tax code excessively complicated that it is complicated. So still pretty much their fault.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

spwrozek posted:

It is because they lobby so hard to make the tax code excessively complicated that it is complicated. So still pretty much their fault.

Yeah there is literally no reason to have "adjusted basis" be a thing for normal operations. Or for withholding to be fixed at 22% even if your employer knows you are likely above that rate on salary alone. Other things we can blame on a different set of lobbyists but it's all the same thing.

SlapActionJackson
Jul 27, 2006

Intuit's great sin is their lobbying to prevent the IRS from launching a direct, free competitor to Turbo Tax. The real complexity in the tax code is defining income in a comprehensive way that aims to tax profit, not revenue and the burning desire of Congress to do most of its social engineering via taxes.

silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost
Eh, I don't know if it really is that important for the government to make filing taxes easier for people who receive stock compensation . . . I think it would be smarter to focus on government reform to address much greater injustices in this world.

Duckman2008
Jan 6, 2010

TFW you see Flyers goaltending.
Grimey Drawer

moana posted:

gently caress this, all of our clients who wait until April 13th to drop off their poo poo are now going to wait until May 13th. I hope none of them find out. Last year was protracted tax hell :(

Also, those who filed early (like me) probably have to amend taxes because they waived unemployment federal income tax.

Like, I’ll take it, but you could have said “wait to file taxes!” (Yeah I know that would never happen).

silvergoose
Mar 18, 2006

IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS




silence_kit posted:

Eh, I don't know if it really is that important for the government to make filing taxes easier for people who receive stock compensation . . . I think it would be smarter to focus on government reform to address much greater injustices in this world.

As with basically all instances of this argument, the government can do more than one thing, and people saying "this is wrong and should be changed" does not imply "to the exclusion of other things".

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


silence_kit posted:

Eh, I don't know if it really is that important for the government to make filing taxes easier for people who receive stock compensation . . . I think it would be smarter to focus on government reform to address much greater injustices in this world.

Yeah when we say that top priority is not catering to rich assholes, improving the tax code is literally the opposite of catering to rich assholes.

freeasinbeer
Mar 26, 2015

by Fluffdaddy
I have a few questions:

Background: I’m on track to fully find my 401k and my partners 401k, my HSA, and we make too much to do straight Roth.

1. Are there anything off hand I should be doing I think that’s all my tax advantaged space

2. I’m doing straight 401k and not Roth, because I’m in NYC making NYC salary, and can foresee myself having way less income in the future, yet I see folks extolling Roth 401k, is there something I’m missing beyond my bet that my taxes are at the highest right now?

3. So I have a bunch of money in a traditional IRA, that is rollover from some 401ks, in order to start doing straight back door Roth’s my understanding is that I need to transfer from all my previous rollovers from my IRA to 401k, so as to not trigger the taxes(I forget the name of the rule).

3a. If that’s true is there any cooling off period

3b. Is it worth all the hassle?

4. Assuming me and my partner are contributing to all of our tax advantage space what should I be doing beyond that? Should I set up a taxable brokerage? Or if we want to have the freedom to buy a house should I be keeping the rest as cash somewhere. I’d throw it in HYSA but they seem to be almost worthless at the moment, I guess it feels weird to just let so much money sit.

Edit: I could also I guess try and max out more of my partners tax advantaged space and have them do the back door Roth, but getting them to max out their 401k was pulling teeth, even with me handing them them money to cover the paycheck shortfall. We make vastly different incomes and I have to be sensitive to their fears of losing their income and independence.

Edit2: also I’m nervous throwing too much money into the market if we have a vague idea that we might want to be in a position to think about buying around this time next year.

freeasinbeer fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Mar 18, 2021

Heroic Yoshimitsu
Jan 15, 2008

If I'm trying to choose between two dates for a target date fund, 2050 or 2055, how's the best way to choose? What happens if I choose the 2055 fund but I wind up retiring on 2052/3?

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Heroic Yoshimitsu posted:

If I'm trying to choose between two dates for a target date fund, 2050 or 2055, how's the best way to choose? What happens if I choose the 2055 fund but I wind up retiring on 2052/3?

the difference is the further out the date (e.g. 2055), the more the current asset allocation is focused on stocks over bonds. E.g. as time goes by, all these target date funds do is shift the asset allocation.

It's unlikely you'll actually still be holding those specific funds 30+ years from now, but if you are, as you approach retirement age if you decide to retire early or late you can just sell one fund to buy the other, or, maybe just add a little stock fund or a little bond fund to manually shift your allocation.

SlapActionJackson
Jul 27, 2006

freeasinbeer posted:

I have a few questions:

1. Probably not, you’re asking the right questions below. Only thing I'd suggest is the mega backdoor Roth if your 401k is compatible.

2. No, if you think your tax rate will be lower in retirement, you want non-Roth.

3. Yes. Pro-rata rule.

3a. No.

3b. Yes.

4. If you really think you might be house shopping in a year, you want a HYSA, despite the fact they don't earn much right now. Your timeline is too short for stocks. After you have your down payment and closing costs saved up, you can open a taxable brokerage account.

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

freeasinbeer posted:

2. I’m doing straight 401k and not Roth, because I’m in NYC making NYC salary, and can foresee myself having way less income in the future, yet I see folks extolling Roth 401k, is there something I’m missing beyond my bet that my taxes are at the highest right now?

If you can still max out your 401k with Roth and do the other stuff too then it essentially gives you more room to save. You're saving $19500 either way, with Roth you won't have to pay taxes on it at retirement so you have more at the end despite paying higher taxes overall.

spwrozek
Sep 4, 2006

Sail when it's windy

Jose Valasquez posted:

If you can still max out your 401k with Roth and do the other stuff too then it essentially gives you more room to save. You're saving $19500 either way, with Roth you won't have to pay taxes on it at retirement so you have more at the end despite paying higher taxes overall.

Only if tax rate is in your favor when you retire. It is all a guess. I would probably go traditional for anything in the 32% bucket and probably would argue the 24% bucket is a toss up.

freeasinbeer
Mar 26, 2015

by Fluffdaddy
I’m also not from New York, have no strong ties to the area and could conceivably retire to Florida(or somewhere else without state tax), if not just plain moving overseas. So if it saves me NYS and NYC taxes today, that seems also in my favor.

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

spwrozek posted:

Only if tax rate is in your favor when you retire. It is all a guess. I would probably go traditional for anything in the 32% bucket and probably would argue the 24% bucket is a toss up.
Even if the tax rate isn't in your favor, if you're maxing out either way it usually works out to be advantageous to pay the taxes now because you don't pay them on the gains.

You either
A) Put in $19,500 now and pay taxes on all of it and the earnings. Assuming you're getting 8% annual returns and leaving it alone for 20 years that turns into $96k and you're going to pay in the ballpark of $15k in taxes assuming the brackets don't change.
B) Put in $19,500 and pay ~$6340 total taxes assuming you're in the 32% bracket (a fair assumption if you're maxing out)

If you're putting the same amount in either way you're almost always better off with Roth unless you're getting close to retirement and the compounding interest won't outweigh the extra taxes. This all assumes you aren't missing out on another tax advantaged account that you could be putting that $6340 in though

DELETE CASCADE
Oct 25, 2017

i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003
the news says my tech stocks went down because the bond market went up. my tech stock holdings did indeed go down, but my bond holdings did not go up. plz advise

DNK
Sep 18, 2004

There’s a difference between a bond and a fund of bonds.

There’s also a difference between a bond you own and a bond you’ve yet to buy.

And, finally, bonds are not stocks. Bonds describe a fixed set of payments that will occur. It’s a guaranteed*, quantified return on investment.

Imagine that yesterday you paid $1000 for a bond that guaranteed 5% payments for 30 years. Secondly, imagine that the bond market is competitive and that going rate is common. How much is that bond worth today? Right about $1000. You could sell it before it’s maturity date to someone else for $1000.

What happens if bonds start offering 10%? Your 5% bond is weaksauce. You paid $1000 for it, but if you wanted to sell it (on the secondary market), no one would pay $1000 — they could buy a 10% bond for $1000! So your currently existing bond is worth less because interest rates rose for new bonds.

So why doesn’t your bond fund increase in value when yields rise? Because that’s silly! Your bond funds should decrease in value!

MJP
Jun 17, 2007

Are you looking at me Senpai?

Grimey Drawer
I've got a bunch of VXUS. Should I be selling it for VTIAX?

Baxate
Feb 1, 2011

MJP posted:

I've got a bunch of VXUS. Should I be selling it for VTIAX?

No, why? They're the same thing.

MJP
Jun 17, 2007

Are you looking at me Senpai?

Grimey Drawer
Just making sure - I didn't know if there was some wisdom or rule where you should use a mutual fund when an ETF is available. I'll keep it as is unless there's a pressing reason.

SirPablo
May 1, 2004

Pillbug
Funded an IRA for my wife and bought SPY, probably at the top. You can blame me for the drop.

Twerk from Home
Jan 17, 2009

This avatar brought to you by the 'save our dead gay forums' foundation.

DELETE CASCADE posted:

the news says my tech stocks went down because the bond market went up. my tech stock holdings did indeed go down, but my bond holdings did not go up. plz advise

It's worse than that, bond rates going up will actually cause currently existing bond prices to fall.

So, you should expect your tech stocks to go down, and also your bond holdings to go down.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

acidx posted:

S&P 500 to drop 40% by Friday.



Thanks!

Edit: Jeez on mobile that doesn't look so obnoxiously large.

H110Hawk fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Mar 19, 2021

ROJO
Jan 14, 2006

Oven Wrangler
So, question for those that have an HMBradley account - got one set up and a minor $20 direct deposit from my paycheck going there, and got it up to the 3% tier successfully. I'll be transferring a significant chunk of my savings from Alliant over to there since the Alliant rate is such crap these days, but I wanted to clarify how their Tiers work if you take money out. Since my direct deposits are going to be small (~40/mo), I assume any significant withdrawal I would make would cause my "savings rate" to fall, and wreck my interest for the following quarter? So I should really only ever withdraw from here when I really need to actually draw my savings down to not kill my interest for a whole quarter? Or am I misunderstanding this?

Also, does the $100k limit result in 0% interest on just the balance OVER $100k? Or if you trip over $100k does it trigger zero interest for your entire account balance?

spwrozek
Sep 4, 2006

Sail when it's windy

Jose Valasquez posted:

Even if the tax rate isn't in your favor, if you're maxing out either way it usually works out to be advantageous to pay the taxes now because you don't pay them on the gains.

You either
A) Put in $19,500 now and pay taxes on all of it and the earnings. Assuming you're getting 8% annual returns and leaving it alone for 20 years that turns into $96k and you're going to pay in the ballpark of $15k in taxes assuming the brackets don't change.
B) Put in $19,500 and pay ~$6340 total taxes assuming you're in the 32% bracket (a fair assumption if you're maxing out)

If you're putting the same amount in either way you're almost always better off with Roth unless you're getting close to retirement and the compounding interest won't outweigh the extra taxes. This all assumes you aren't missing out on another tax advantaged account that you could be putting that $6340 in though

If you only have $19500 and go with Roth you tax that first and only invest $13300 (in the 32% example) Or with the $6300 tax saving on the Trad you invest that if you are maxing the Roth to the to $19500 (which is ~$25800).

If you only had $19500:

Trad $19500 for 20 years at 8% = $90,888 with a 32% tax = $61804
Roth $19500 with 32% tax = $13260 for 20 years at 8% = $61804

If you had the funds to max the Roth and invested that money (gets a little tricky since you are going to invest the tax savings in a taxable account)

Trad $19500 end up at the same number $61804. $6240 in a taxable (this will assume no taxes over the 20 years) 20 years, 8%, is $29084 with 15% LTCG = $24721. Total = $86525
Roth $19500, 20 years, 8% = $90,888

So you might be able to get a little more with option 2 but only if you stay in the 32% bracket for all this money. Which is just a guess. If you are in a higher bracket and live well below your means then I think trad will make a lot of sense.

That said I have traditional, roth, and taxable. Just hedge all the bets.

Silly Burrito
Nov 27, 2007

SET A COURSE FOR
THE FLAVOR QUADRANT

ROJO posted:

So, question for those that have an HMBradley account - got one set up and a minor $20 direct deposit from my paycheck going there, and got it up to the 3% tier successfully. I'll be transferring a significant chunk of my savings from Alliant over to there since the Alliant rate is such crap these days, but I wanted to clarify how their Tiers work if you take money out. Since my direct deposits are going to be small (~40/mo), I assume any significant withdrawal I would make would cause my "savings rate" to fall, and wreck my interest for the following quarter? So I should really only ever withdraw from here when I really need to actually draw my savings down to not kill my interest for a whole quarter? Or am I misunderstanding this?

Also, does the $100k limit result in 0% interest on just the balance OVER $100k? Or if you trip over $100k does it trigger zero interest for your entire account balance?

You're kind of doing what I'm planning.

I left most of my direct deposit with Alliant that normally goes there for bills and things, but I took 80% of my Alliant money that is pure savings/emergency funds and shunted it over to HMBradley. I don't plan to touch that at all, just basically keeping it at 3% forever, but yeah if I ever take money out it's going to mess up the savings rate for that quarter. My direct deposit is $50 every 2 weeks with HM, so if I pull more than 80 out, yeah.

I figure at the worst I can always transfer it back to Alliant if things go south with the savings rate.

Not sure on the 100k question, I'd definitely call and ask.

DELETE CASCADE
Oct 25, 2017

i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003

DNK posted:

There’s a difference between a bond and a fund of bonds.

There’s also a difference between a bond you own and a bond you’ve yet to buy.

And, finally, bonds are not stocks. Bonds describe a fixed set of payments that will occur. It’s a guaranteed*, quantified return on investment.

Imagine that yesterday you paid $1000 for a bond that guaranteed 5% payments for 30 years. Secondly, imagine that the bond market is competitive and that going rate is common. How much is that bond worth today? Right about $1000. You could sell it before it’s maturity date to someone else for $1000.

What happens if bonds start offering 10%? Your 5% bond is weaksauce. You paid $1000 for it, but if you wanted to sell it (on the secondary market), no one would pay $1000 — they could buy a 10% bond for $1000! So your currently existing bond is worth less because interest rates rose for new bonds.

So why doesn’t your bond fund increase in value when yields rise? Because that’s silly! Your bond funds should decrease in value!

this makes perfect sense, and also makes me wonder why i bought bnd. i should sell it all! for a loss of $88

DNK
Sep 18, 2004

I’ll just note that yields are not increasing by 5% overnight like my (purposefully extreme) example. They’re increasing by 0.01 (WHOAAAHAHHAAAA!!!!!!).

Your $1000 @ 1.07% is worth $1000 when rates are @ 1.07% (tautology).

When rates rise to 1.08% your $1000 is worth.... like $999. Meanwhile, the stock market is imploding and tech stocks drop 15%.

That’s why you own BND.

Yeah, you’re going to lose a tiny amount of value as rates rise. So loving what. You wanna put it in cash with an interest rate of 0.01%? The bond fund’s cash distributions will make up for whatever market value loss is incurred.

pmchem
Jan 22, 2010


DNK posted:

That’s why you own BND.

Yeah, you’re going to lose a tiny amount of value as rates rise. So loving what. You wanna put it in cash with an interest rate of 0.01%? The bond fund’s cash distributions will make up for whatever market value loss is incurred.

that bolded statement is not necessarily true. here's BND's _total_ return (including distributions reinvested) over the past 6 months:
https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?BND&n=126&O=011000

-3.5%

yes, you literally wanted to be in cash with an interest rate of 0.01% rather than owning BND the last 6 months, if those were your only two options.

a reasonable person may believe this trend could continue for many more months.

DNK
Sep 18, 2004

Yeah, but over the past 5 years BND has outperformed cash (~27% total return).

It’s totally possible to pay attention to bond yields rising and dip in and out, but that’s a lot of effort for marginal gains (you gotta time it right on both exit and re-entry and your reward is 3.5% performance or whatever on the portion of your money that you’re using as a stable source of value).

DNK fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Mar 19, 2021

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Also, one more missing piece here is that you're supposed to periodically rebalance. If stocks plunge, but your bond fund only goes down a wee bit, then your allocation to bonds will be higher than it was: so, perhaps annually, you rebalance by shifting some money from bonds into stocks; you'll be "buying low" on those stocks, and able to do that because the bond fund preserved value in your account.

Of course you could also do this if you have just stocks and cash: but as DNK points out, in the long run bonds tend to return more than cash.

And, similarly, when stocks massively outperform bonds, you have to reallocate some stocks into bonds while they're "high" - which may cut your returns if stocks continue to outperform, but on the other hand, if stocks subsequently fall, well, you had less money in them, etc. etc.

If this sounds like timing the market, well, it kind of is... except instead of rebalancing as a reaction to the immediate market conditions or changing your allocation as a prediction of future market conditions, you do it by rote, at a fixed cadence (annually is fine). This tends to compensate for medium-term market trends (over the course of a few years) while not exposing you excessively to making the "wrong call" on short timeframes, or becoming excessively concentrated in stocks (or bonds) in the long term.

Of course, there are still valid arguments about whether bonds are a good or the best hedge against stock volatility; whether long-term investors, especially younger investors, ought to hedge against volatility at all; and whether the drawbacks of bonds outweigh the advantage of hedging against volatility.

GhostofJohnMuir
Aug 14, 2014

anime is not good
also isn't the tendency for people to flee equity for the safety of bonds in a downturn supposed to lead to high demand which would actually push yields down, so that bond prices can actually rise when equities are cratering? i'm not sure if that assumed tendency was valid now or in the past, but if it does exist it goes a long way to explain the assumption that you hedge your equity with bonds, because if correct, the inverse correlation makes them a perfect hedge

anecdotally, i remember periods after the great recession in which investor demand kept yields on treasuries super low for an extended period of time, outside of the machinations of the fed

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Well: if money is fleeing stocks, and that's why stocks are falling, then that money may seek the safety of bonds, especially if bonds are still returning better than inflation.

On the other hand, if stocks plunge and destroy everyone's value, they don't have much money to go buy bonds with?

On the gripping hand, what you see reported as "bonds" in the news is usually treasuries, and the appetite for treasuries is heavily influenced by international finance and events, plus the rate of government borrowing adds to the supply of those bonds, and the Fed's interest rate obviously affects everything too, and that also isn't necessarily related to what the stock market is doing (although sometimes it probably is).

The result is: ehh. Yeah? Maybe. Sometimes? Probably!

DNK
Sep 18, 2004

My take on why “stock money fleeing for bonds” isn’t pushing yields down is because the Fed is cutting bond purchases.

Fed bond buying is the elephant in the room. Otherwise yeah the stock/bond capital crossflows tend to counterbalance each-other. The fed just had their finger on the scale.

pmchem
Jan 22, 2010


Leperflesh posted:

Of course, there are still valid arguments about whether bonds are a good or the best hedge against stock volatility; whether long-term investors, especially younger investors, ought to hedge against volatility at all; and whether the drawbacks of bonds outweigh the advantage of hedging against volatility.

yes, I generally agree with your post. As I've tried to point out previously[1] in this thread, bond funds are not risk-free investments. But they're often treated that way for casual discussion, and it's often been close enough to the truth to not really matter because we've been in a multi-decade bull market for bonds. But the 10-year note rate was drat near zero last year. Big time bond traders have acknowledged just how horrible the past year has been for bonds, and honestly, that might continue for a while still.

https://twitter.com/lisaabramowicz1/status/1370435778443149312?s=20
https://twitter.com/BChappatta/status/1370408259404767237?s=20

[1] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=2892928&pagenumber=893&perpage=40#post512900844
just since time of that post earlier this month, BND lost 1.5%, which is more than its annualized yield to maturity https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/profile/portfolio/bnd or 30-day SEC yield.

If your assets are denominated in USD, a US Treasury bill/note/bond held to maturity is the quintessential risk-free return. But bond funds, rebalanced against equities in a portfolio, are NOT simply US Treasuries held to maturity unless you're dealing with complicated bond ladders (almost nobody here is doing that). So bond funds are NOT risk-free, and in fact, the higher yielding, purely US treasury bond funds such as TLT (or any other long T-bond fund) have been even more rapid paths to wealth destruction than a broad fund such as BND.

Someday this nasty market for bonds will change, but man, currently, BUYER BEWARE if you own bond funds that are not interest-rate hedged.


DNK posted:

My take on why “stock money fleeing for bonds” isn’t pushing yields down is because the Fed is cutting bond purchases.

Fed bond buying is the elephant in the room. Otherwise yeah the stock/bond capital crossflows tend to counterbalance each-other. The fed just had their finger on the scale.

Your first sentence has things almost exactly backwards. The Fed is not cutting bond purchases; they are completely unchanged. As per the FOMC meeting earlier this week,https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/monetary20210317a1.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-reserve-interest-rates-bond-purchases-march-2021-11615917632

quote:

In addition, the Federal Reserve will continue to increase its holdings of Treasury securities by at least $80 billion per month and of agency mortgage‑backed securities by at least $40 billion per month until substantial further progress has been made toward the Committee’s maximum employment and price stability goals

Most of those treasury purchases are at the front-end of the curve. The market had been hoping/wanting some indication they'd do more long-end purchases. Nothing was offered to that effect from the Fed. Thus, bond traders continued to sell basically anything at 5-year note and longer durations, with the 5-year, 10-year, and 30-year treasury yields all making a new 1-year highs yesterday. It is that increase in bond yields which has been driving the sell-offs of stocks with high p/e ratios (or negative earnings). Stock money isn't fleeing for bonds. Money is fleeing bonds, it is causing other money to flee certain stocks, and that money fleeing is ending up in various short-term assets, value stocks, or the dollar itself.

In fact, you earlier dismissed cash, but if we compare the total return of BND to UUP (a foreign exchange dollar index ETF) since Jan. 1, we see this:
https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?BND,UUP&n=54&O=011000
You're up by over 6% if you held a fund tracking the fiat value of dollars as compared to BND year-to-date!

That is, again, ultimately a consequence of money fleeing bonds.

At some point this will all settle down and tech/growth stocks will resume their upward climb and BND will even have its changes in value more than covered by its yield.

But, I think it adds to the value of the thread to have a more complete understanding of bonds and their risks. They're not risk-free, and this Fed is quite content with the current rapid changes in bond yields.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Just to add, for those reading along: our usual bond funds that most of us are holding, like the vanguard total bond market fund (VBTLX, traded as an ETF as BND), includes all of: treasuries, municipal bonds, and corporate bonds, plus some other smaller categories. These bonds all tend to move in the same direction, broadly and generally, but they're not all exactly the same thing and it's worth understanding what they really are:

Treasuries: bonds issued by the US federal government, so that it can borrow money. Considered the safest bonds in the world, e.g., the world considers the risk of the US government defaulting on them to be so negligible as to not be worth worrying about.

Municipal bonds: states and (especially) counties & cities often borrow. It's very rare, but not unheard-of, for a municipal government to go into default. Still, these are usually considered fairly safe bonds; but because they aren't as safe as treasuries, they have higher yields (to compensate for the higher risk).

Corporate bonds: companies often borrow money by selling bonds. These run all the way from "probably as safe or safer than many munis" to "extremely dangerous bullshit from companies destined for spectacular bankruptcy". This category breaks down further into various flavors: utilities, asset-backed/mortgage-backed, finance, etc.

"Others" includes foreign and uh, I dunno. Don't worry about them, VBTLX/BND only has 3.1% foreign bonds and 0.9% "other."

Across these categories, bonds are "rated" with various letter grades, which is supposed to tell investors something about how much risk there is of the bond, but: take ratings with lots of grains of salt, because just like (say) moody's ratings of mutual funds, this is a product being sold by a company whose main customers are the very same companies they're rating.

The leading ratings agencies for bonds are Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and I guess Fitch? They're letter grades, so like AAA, AA, A, BAA, BBB, etc. and the different agencies have their own differences in how they scale (Moody's Baa rating is = to S&P's BBB rating).

You may have heard the terms "investment-grade" and "junk" as applied to bonds, and these are simply bonds rated above or below a particular threshold. S&P's BBB- or Moody's Baa3 ratings are the cutoffs according to an Investopedia article I just checked, so bonds rated below those are "junk bonds".

Major bond index funds like VBTLX/BND do not invest anything in junk bonds; this is how the fund is currently allocated by rating:
pre:
U.S. Government	63.4%
AAA		5.0%
AA		3.2%
A		12.6%
BBB		15.8%
Total		100.0%
So you can see that it's important to talk about and understand treasuries even when we're referring to a total bond market fund, because treasuries are by far the largest category of that fund: but, over a third of the fund is non-treasuries, and a significant portion of it is lower-graded (but still investment-grade) munis and corporate bonds.

DNK
Sep 18, 2004

pmchem posted:

Your first sentence has things almost exactly backwards. The Fed is not cutting bond purchases; they are completely unchanged. As per the FOMC meeting earlier this week,https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/monetary20210317a1.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-reserve-interest-rates-bond-purchases-march-2021-11615917632

Most of those treasury purchases are at the front-end of the curve. The market had been hoping/wanting some indication they'd do more long-end purchases. Nothing was offered to that effect from the Fed. Thus, bond traders continued to sell basically anything at 5-year note and longer durations, with the 5-year, 10-year, and 30-year treasury yields all making a new 1-year highs yesterday. It is that increase in bond yields which has been driving the sell-offs of stocks with high p/e ratios (or negative earnings). Stock money isn't fleeing for bonds. Money is fleeing bonds, it is causing other money to flee certain stocks, and that money fleeing is ending up in various short-term assets, value stocks, or the dollar itself.

...

But, I think it adds to the value of the thread to have a more complete understanding of bonds and their risks. They're not risk-free, and this Fed is quite content with the current rapid changes in bond yields.

Thanks for the detail. I feel more comfortable talking about the general scheme of things (why BND is better than cash in long-term contexts) than in-the-moment analysis. It was my own conjecture re: bond yields and fed buying. Happy to be corrected, haha.

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pokeyman
Nov 26, 2006

That elephant ate my entire platoon.
Why do I care where bond fund yields are heading for the next few months, when I plan on being invested and rebalancing for years/decades?

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