Its been almost 4 months (June 26 to be precise) since I last posted on municipal bond valuations. I thought this would be a good time to do a quick update on muni valuations. In short, there is still compelling value in municipal bonds for long term investors willing to Read more…
The recent “taper-tantrum” over the Fed’s potential coming removal of quantitative easing has caused quite some unrest in the bond market. This has caused interest rates, in particular longer term rates (10yrs +) to move substantially higher across the board. Long term munis were no exception and the sell off Read more…
I’ve been thinking about writing an income investing newsletter at some point….but haven’t quite committed to that concept yet. Baby steps, baby steps….so, with that in mind I thought I’d start out with a monthly commentary on the positions I hold or have held throughout the month. Feel free to Read more…
The fiscal cliff is coming and the politicians are going to let us drive right over it. At least that’s the drumbeat you hear in the financial news media. And with 5 months to go until the end of 2012 the drumbeat is picking up its tempo. With that in Read more…
How many times a week do you read that interest rates have no where to go but up? That bonds are terrible investments and will be crushed by rising rates? And when was the first time you started to hear these stories? If you read pretty much any source of Read more…
Here we go again. Just as we hit the one year anniversary of Meredith Whitney’s famous, or more accurately infamous, muni bond call a new muni bond scare has surfaced. This time its the potential change to municipal bond’s tax status. Lets take a look at this latest fear and Read more…
Now that the first half of 2011 is over I wanted to step back and look at the performance of the sectors in the income investor dashboard. Lets look at the YTD performance of the dashboard and see if it offers any insights. Below are the 1H 2011 total returns Read more…
Just when you thought it was safe to back in the water…here comes the shark again…in this case muni bond ultra bear Meridith Whitney. Whitney is back in the spotlight again renewing her call for massive defaults in municipal bonds. Absolute Returns (AR) did a great screencast the other day Read more…
Last month I introduced my income investor dashboard that helps me keep tabs on the investment landscape from an income investor’s point of view. I’ve updated the dashboard as of this morning. Here it is: I added this month’s updates to the table and calculated the change in yields from Read more…
In my Time to buy munis? post the other day I think I left out a couple of key elements in my desire to keep the post from becoming too long. As I said in my last paragraph, an even slightly aggressive income investor may want to look at muni Read more…
I’ve been looking at municipal bonds recently. Whenever I see a large sell off in any asset class accompanied with a lot of media hype the contrarian hairs in the back of my neck tend to perk up. All markets tend to over react more often than not. These over Read more…