The trouble with bonds

What is more, given QE’s permanent, if variable, role, it’s important for investors to forget about GDP forecasting when talking about the credit cycle. Instead, they should pay attention to what’s happening to central banks’ balance sheets and to their guidance. That's necessary because QE has disconnected the credit cycle from the economic cycle.

It’s also important to retain plenty of flexibility. Investors shouldn’t just rely on market liquidity to satisfy their investment needs. By trying to shore up banks’ balance sheets, central banks reduced liquidity in markets. It means investors have to be prepared to absorb more shocks in future. 

Keeping pace with debt

G6 central bank balance sheets and national debt as % of GDP

Fifthly, it pays to think a bit differently by taking a contrarian stance or buying out-of-favour assets. Ugly can be beautiful. Before QE, investors would have done well by investing in the previous year’s best performing sectors. After QE, the strategy that worked best was to buy the 'losers’, assets that are out of favour but still have value.

The sixth lesson is that the yield curve matters. As an investor, the most important decision you’re going to make is duration, or whether to raise or lower your portfolio's sensitivity to changes in interest rates. Before the crisis, curve positioning and duration decisions went pretty much hand in hand. Back then, investors had two basic curve strategy options, depending on how they saw central bank policy unfolding.

If they expected rate cuts, they’d use bull steepeners, under which shorter dated bonds are expected to outperform long-dated ones. Or, if investors envisaged rate rises, they’d set up bear flattener trades, which are designed to benefit from a sell-off in shorter-maturity debt. But since the crisis, other types of yield curve strategies are just as common as a result of central bank bond buying.

Then there’s the matter of changes in the relationship between different fixed income assets. There have been several instances in which assets that usually move in lockstep with one another failed to do so for long periods, and vice versa. In other words, bond investors cannot rely on historic market correlations.

Before the crisis, investors could rest assured that they would achieve a decent amount of diversification by combining safe government bonds and credit in their portfolios. And that the correlation of returns between the two was relatively stable. But after the crisis, this correlation has fluctuated. This is a new risk and it’s not going to go away.

And finally, zombies can be opportunities. Once upon a time, companies that struggled to pay the interest on their debt would fail. But with low interest rates and investors willing to refinance these companies, there has been a fairly gradual increase of the number of such zombie firms globally. Before the crisis, credit managers would do their credit work and make their selections only from among companies that could actually pay their interest costs. But after QE, that probably was not the right answer. You had to pick some of the zombies to outperform.

By the same token, investors need to be aware that as central banks remove liquidity from the system, as they try to reverse QE, credit markets are likely to be most vulnerable. That’s where the rubber hits the road.

Ultimately, investors need to bear in mind that the fixed income markets’ transformation since the financial crisis is here to stay.

We need to face reality and think that maybe the lessons we’ve learned over the last 10 years will also apply over the next 10.