Thursday, March 21, 2013

Bond crash dead ahead: tick, tick ... boom!



SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) – InvestmentNews latest cover is so powerful you can actually hear sirens atop a flashing neon billboard, megawarning in huge bold type: “Tick, Tick ... Boom!”
Yes, they do expect the bond bomb to explode and are publishing “a special report on the impending crisis in the bond market.”A warning: InvestmentNews wants to make damn sure its readers, the 90,000 professional financial advisers who rely on timeliness and accuracy of every INews forecast, understand: “What will your clients’ portfolios look like when the bond bomb goes off?” Get it? Not if but when it happens.
Yes, you heard them. “Tick, Tick ... Boom!” Wake up, it’s an “impending crisis,” dead ahead. And to punctuate their message, InvestmentNews added an alarming photo of an alarm clock with huge bells, wired to rolled-up bonds looking like a stack of dynamite sticks. “Tick, Tick ... Boom!”
InvestmentNews is not staffed by a bunch of alarmists, quite the opposite — conservative, trustworthy and methodical. They know the 90,000 registered investment advisers that rely on them are in turn responsible for advising millions of Americans and managing trillions of retirement assets. Yes, their audience demands reliable forecasts.
So listen closely, we’ll summarize Andrew Osterland’s lead article “Fear Rising With Rates,” along with an interview with Bond King Bill Gross. And INews editorials on “repositioning client money” with “strategies for rising rates.” And a couple of opposing portfolio suggestions: “The case for, and against, stocks.”
The bull says we’re on “the verge of an even bigger run-up. The bear warns, if your “goal is to avoid losses, stay out of equities altogether.”
Either way, the INews report reads like a Stephen King horror story, and in the background you hear the ticking ... ticking ... louder ... louder ... Boom!”