Did You Get Bryan's Hertz Pick Before It Blasted Off? See How to Get His Next Recommendation Here. Editor's Note: Our guest editorial below covers a very important kind of investment that your portfolio might be missing... one that could help safeguard your wealth during volatile times like we are seeing right now. -Ryan Fitzwater, Associate Publisher
Marc Lichtenfeld, Chief Income Strategist, The Oxford Club It's no secret that I'm a stock guy - particularly dividend-paying stocks. There are no investments out there that reliably grow wealth over the long term like stocks. Over decades, stocks are even safer than bonds, which goes against conventional thinking. Jeremy Siegel's book Stocks for the Long Run shows that not only do stocks outperform bonds - which is not a surprise - but also, over 10-year periods and longer, stocks' worst performance was also better than the worst performance of bonds. Between 1802 and 2012, the worst 10 years for stocks showed a decline of 4.1%, while bonds dropped 5.4%. Over a 20-year period, stocks never lost money, while bonds' worst performance came in at -3.1%. So why am I adding bonds to my portfolio? In the short run, bonds - especially those of quality companies - are safer than stocks. I Can't Take Much Risk I'm paying for my kids' college tuition. My wife and I have diligently saved and invested for 18 years for this moment. Over the next four years, we will pay an insane amount of cash to an institution of higher learning. And I'm not willing to take much risk with that chunk of money. The closest you'll come to a guarantee of getting your principal back is an investment in Treasurys. That being said, owning quality corporate bonds is a pretty safe bet. Junk bonds, the riskiest corporate bonds, have had a default rate of just 2.6% per year over the past five years. That's lower than the historical average of 4.2%, and the bonds most likely to default were the junkiest of the junk. Bonds rated BB, the junk bond rating closest to investment grade, had a default rate of just 0.18%. Over the past 32 years, bonds with an investment-grade rating had a minuscule default rate of 0.1% per year. In other words, odds were 1 in 1,000 that these bonds would default. And no investment-grade bonds have defaulted in the past 10 years. Your chances of getting your money back are extremely high. |
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