This article is part of a series; click here to read Part One. I would argue that it is much easier for a retiree to ignore unrealized capital losses on an individual bond than for a professional trader or retiree needing to…

As a bond provides a contractual right to a series of future payments received at specified points of time, the price for a bond is simply the present discounted value of the future cash flows. The face value of a bond will…

Duration matching is not straightforward for bond funds when shares of the bond fund must be sold to meet ongoing retirement expenses. If rates have risen, shares of the bond fund may need to be sold at a loss, with more shares…

Understanding the relationship between bond risk and time to maturity and duration of a bond provides the basis for understanding the bond yield curve. The yield curve shows the yields to maturity for a series of bonds—typically US Treasury bonds—with the same…

This article is part of a series; click here to read part 1. In 2003, Zvi Bodie and Michael J. Clowes published the book Worry-Free Investing: A Safe Approach to Achieving Your Lifetime Financial Goals, in which they argued that typical retirement-oriented…

In discussing retirement liabilities, it is also important to address the issue of inflation and how to think about bonds when they are meant to fund a liability that grows with the consumer price index. Fortunately, this is now practical as the…

Bond prices are sensitive to interest rate changes, and bond duration is a measure of just how sensitive. For instance, in Exhibit 1.1 (shown in my last article), an increase in interest rates for the simple bond from 3 percent to 4…

Before we can discuss bonds in depth, it is important that we establish a common understanding of what bonds are and how they work. As a starting point, a bond is a contractual obligation to make a series of specific payments on…

This article is part of a series; click here to read Part 1. The safety-first school of thought was originally derived from academic models of how people allocate their resources over a lifetime to maximize lifetime satisfaction. Academics have studied these models…