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Stock markets have been on an uncomfortable ride in 2020, leaving open a great deal of confusion and many questions as to what happened and what comes next. While we don’t know with any certainty what comes next, we are beginning to understand what happened and why markets have responded so strongly since March 23rd. This year has once again reminded us that stock market volatility is a basic axiom of investing. Although it may disappear for long stretches and the collective of investors are lulled into a sense of boredom, volatility inevitably returns at an unexpected time and in…

Our core Fixed Income managers invest in high credit quality sectors such as investment grade municipal and corporate bonds, U.S. Treasury securities, and Government Agency Mortgage Back Securities (MBS). However, many additional fixed income securities exist, primarily of lower credit quality. We call these securities and the managers that invest in them “satellite” fixed income. Two of the largest and best known of these satellite fixed income sectors include High Yield bonds and Bank Loans (aka Leveraged or Senior Loans). The first graph below shows the Yield on the High Yield Index vs. U.S. Treasuries, the “spread”. Please note that…

You may have seen a couple of notes from us over the past few weeks discussing markets and COVID-19. To break up the tone and for additional perspective, we thought it worthwhile to relay what we are hearing from our investment managers. Below are just a couple observations from the many conversations we are having with municipal bond managers about recent volatility in the investment grade muni space. The response was fairly consistent across the board and broke down into liquidity, valuation, and credit quality. Liquidity One manager mentioned that prior to a few weeks ago, municipal bond mutual funds…