So I asked myself the following question: should I have listened to your brokers' advice to buy Irish or US bonds in 2009?
Well, here are two tables giving a breakdown on bond price sensitivities to changes in interest rates. The US table:
And the Irish table is here:
Now, in darker blue I marked the cells corresponding to the reasonably plausible scenario for yields for 2010. In lighter blue - the next best predictions. So go figures - should you have listened to anyone pushing Irish or US bonds onto you?Think of the following numbers - I don't have the same for the Irish markets - in the US, cash inflows into bond funds markets amounted to some USD313 billion in 2009, as yields kept on dropping to artificially low levels on the back of the US Fed buying up Federal paper. At the same time, as stock markets rallied, just USD2 billion net was added to stocks funds. (Numbers are to November 1, 2009). Some has been fooled.
So a Happy New Year for all and best wishes for the new decade!
My next post will be already in 2010 and will show comparative performance for Irish banking sector relative to other EU states - the latest data - for 2008.
