A portfolio comprised primarily of individual bonds offers more transparency of security holdings than
shares of bond mutual funds which are only required to publish actual bond holdings at quarter - end.
So if all of this is a reason why you were considering fixed annuities
instead of bond mutual funds, then just don't do that, and you'll be much better off.
This past week I wrote further on how investors can manage risk, specifically considering the role of bonds and the
risk of bond mutual funds.
I'd bet that two -
thirds of bond mutual fund shareholders don't even know the relationship between bond prices and interest rates.
Get
rid of bond mutual funds that show wide disparities between the mutual fund's portfolio and the investments that the sales literature describes.
So most of the
effects of bond mutual funds going down when interest rates go up are much less than an individual investor holding individual bonds.
Buying individual bonds generally is riskier than buying
shares of a bond mutual fund or ETF because buying one or a few individual bonds offers little or no diversification.
Unlike most
types of bond mutual funds which maintain a constant duration, Defined Maturity Funds allow the duration of the fund to shorten naturally, by buying bonds which all mature around a specific maturity date, and holding those bonds to maturity.
Fidelity has a solution to the above problem which is designed to provide the diversification
benefits of a bond mutual fund, with the declining interest rate sensitivity of an individual bond.
If you are just looking to mimic the
advantages of a bond mutual fund by laddering individual bonds, you will need a lot of money and invest a good amount of time just to replicate what you can get by simply investing in a mutual fund.
• When you invest in mutual funds «correctly,» then you'll own a few types
of bond mutual funds of different sectors, maturities, and countries.
As rates rise, it might be better to hold individual bonds
instead of bond mutual funds, said James Shagawat, a certified financial planner with the Baron Financial Group in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.
Only 8 % of iShares bond ETFs paid out capital gains in 2016, compared to over 30 %
of bond mutual funds.
An individual investor may want to compare the performance of this average with
that of a bond mutual fund, for example.