Goldman Sachs mener, at investorerne bør investere i korte obligationer fremfor at ligge inde med kontanter i banken eller fonde. I USA ligger 4330 milliarder dollar og venter. De penge må bringes i arbejde, mener Goldman. Sådan reagerede investorerne under finanskrisen i 2009, og nu ser Goldman tegn på, at mange investorer går over i ultrakorte og korte obligationer.
Need Income? Consider Short-Duration Bonds
US interest rates are pegged at zero and expected to remain there through 2023. Yet there’s still $4.33 trillion1 in cash sitting on the sidelines. We think there may be a better way to put some of that money to work.
In our view, investors willing to take on a bit more risk might want to consider rolling up the yield curve to boost their exposure to short-duration bonds. With sovereign yields at record lows, high-quality spread sectors in the ultrashort and short-dated space can potentially offer attractive yield opportunities.
Consider this approach a page from the post-financial crisis playbook circa 2009—the last time the Federal Reserve’s benchmark hovered near zero.
Back then, investors were encouraged to take on some credit risk to find value and income while combatting any potential fears of rising rates (as the economy started to expand and recover).
We’ve started to see a similar shift as investors slowly start to gravitate toward ultrashort and short duration securities (Exhibit 1) in search of higher yields in this lower-for-longer yield environment.
EXHIBIT 1: INVESTORS ARE STARTING TO GRAVITATE TO SHORT-TERM BONDS
Source: GSAM, Morningstar Direct and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. As of 10/31/2020.
The way we see it, short-term, multi-sector strategies offer attractive characteristics in today’s challenging yield environment. They have the potential to provide more income than cash alternative strategies and money-market funds2, but their short durations make them less sensitive to interest-rate changes and they typically have had lower levels of credit risk than full market spread sectors.
That can make them a complement to traditional intermediate-term core and core-plus fixed-income allocations. Moreover, short-duration strategies that take a multi-sector approach may benefit from diversification as no one sector leads all the time.
