At the Money: Building a Bond Ladder

At The Money: BlackRock on Building a Bond Ladder (October 23, 2024)

Full transcript below.

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About this week’s guest:

Karen Veraa is a Fixed Income Product Strategist within BlackRock’s Global Fixed Income Group focusing on iShares fixed-income ETFs. She supports iShares clients, generates content on fixed-income markets and ETFs, develops new fixed-income iShares ETF strategies, and partners with the iShares team on product delivery.

For more info, see:

Professional Bio

LinkedIn

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Building a Bond Ladder

Barry Ritholtz: Over the past decade, or maybe even longer, No one’s accurately predicted which way rates were going. Are they going to rise? Are they going to fall? Are they going to stay steady? This creates a challenge for bond investors who are usually looking for a predictable income stream from their fixed-income holdings.

One solution? Create a ladder of bonds of different maturity rates so that regardless of what occurs, you have a predictable yield series. You can lock in higher-yielding paper if rates fall, but you also free up more capital on an annual basis if rates rise,

I’m Barry Ritholtz. And on today’s edition of at the money, we’re going to show you how to create a bond ladder. To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your fixed income portfolio, let’s bring in Karen Veraa. She is head of iShares US fixed income strategy for investing giant black rock. So let’s start simply by What is a bond ladder?

Karen Verra: A bond ladder is a simple tool for investing in the bond market. You take your investing window, let’s say 10 years, and you equally wait every maturity across that 10 year period. So you’ve got bonds that mature in one year, two year, three years, and so on.

It’s a very popular strategy because as you just mentioned, Barry, you, you don’t have to make bets on interest rate risk. You kind of have your investing horizon and you’ve got this more predictable stream of income as well as maturity is coming due each year where you can make a decision about.

Going in the next rung on the bond ladder or doing something else with that money.

Barry Ritholtz: We always seem to divide bond ladders into each rung is the same equity amount. What, what’s the thinking there?

Karen Verra: We do see that as being the most popular. It’s because you can think through that. I’m going to have a certain amount of money. Let’s say I’ve got a hundred thousand dollars to invest and it’s a 10 year-ladder. I’ve got 10, 000 coming due each year. You can kind of think of it in chunks like that.

We do see some people, who are laddering out amounts and retirement accounts, and they need to take those required minimum distributions where they will look at the IRS schedule of how much they have to pull out of the account.

It’s not quite equal, but you can even ladder out those required minimum distributions. Um, you know, it’s about 8 percent instead of 10 percent in the first year, for example. And then you don’t have to sell anything inside your retirement account and you can just pull those out on schedule. So that’s another way that people weight their bond ladders when they’re seeking that goal of having those RMDs coming due every year.

Barry Ritholtz: Let’s talk about what goes into bond ladders. I’m assuming a mix of US Treasury bonds, munis, investment grade corporates, even high yielding. Anything else go into the mix for bond ladders?

Karen Verra: I’d say the most popular tends to be munis and corporate bonds and the investment grade side. We offer a suite of exchange traded funds that mature each year and they’re primarily used to build bond ladders. We have these in high yield as well for people who want to go out and add a little bit more income and credit risk to the portfolios.

We even have them in the tips market. So these days you can build a bond ladder using all these different asset classes.

I think some of the challenges with CDs is typically they’re limited in their term. They may only go out up to five years and sometimes the banks will have restrictions or penalties if you want to sell them early or try to get your money back early. So we’ve seen people migrate away from CD ladders, doing it more with bond and bond ETFs to build these ladders.

Barry Ritholtz: How do investors determine what their timeline is? I think that’s a pretty interesting choice and most people just seem to assume it’s 10 years, but from what I’ve seen, there are a variety of timelines.

Karen Verra: I think people can think about it if they have a liability that they’re managing to or a time based goal. Uh, we see people sometimes building ladders, let’s say three to seven years because maybe they have a cash portfolio for things the next couple of years, but then they don’t want to start their ladder out for a few years.

One to five tends to be the most popular, um, based on data that we have around assets and those different account types.  We rarely see people go out past 10 years. I do see people asking for 15 because I think with the bond ladder, you can accomplish most of your goals within that time horizon of having stability, having income, rolling it every year.

We also see on the corporate side, corporate issues will issue 10-year bonds and they might do a 30-year bond, but there’s not really that much paper that’s actively being issued beyond 10 years. So what tends to happen is there’s just not that many new issues and it’s hard to find the bonds. So I think that’s another reason why that 10 year point tends to be the maximum for most people’s ladders.

Barry Ritholtz: We never know what yields will be in the future. How can an investor lock in the best yields on the duration curve today and benefit over the next decade with their ladders?

Karen Verra: Well, we do have an inverted yield curve right now. So we’ve seen a lot of people overweighting their ladders in that one to two year bucket trying to maximize income. Maybe they do might do an extra, you know, 40, 50 percent than what they would usually do. But I think one of the nice things you can do now is. Try to lock in the yields for the interim. We’ve been telling people on the corporate side, you can get about 5 percent by continuing to go out, 6 to 7 percent for high yield. And so we’re seeing people who are doing that right now, knowing that when the fed starts to cut rates, interest rates are going to come down and they want to put some of that cash to work and consistently be getting four, five, six percent, rather than have it dissipate, um, in those short term vehicles as soon as interest rates go down.

Barry Ritholtz: I continue to see people who are waiting for inflation to re-accelerate. They’re warning that the Fed is, is looking at this incorrectly and that we should be expecting much higher yields.

If that were to happen, didn’t someone who just set up a bond ladder lock in low rates or how does the ladder work in the face of that?

Karen Verra: So when I think about the ladder, it’s going to be a more known investment result than some other more perpetual bond strategies. So you kind of know what your yield is going to be over that period.

You can do a few things. You could use TIPs. So we have for example, tips, term maturity, ETFs, tips I bonds where you, you can get protected for the inflation.

But you also have the periodic income payments kicking off the ladder that you can reinvest at higher yields, which will add income over time. And you also have that discrete point when something matures this year, you can go and grab more income. So what we see is as yields go up, you’re slowly walking that ladder up and, and recouping more of the income over time.

Barry Ritholtz: What about the opposite group of prognosticators, the ones who have been forecasting a recession every year for the past three years that just hasn’t shown up? If there’s a recession and rates fall pretty radically, what happens then? What’s our reinvestment risk there?

Karen Verra: So if you’ve got your ladder locked in at today’s yields and yields come down, that ladder income stream is worth more. So we’ll actually see the prices on the bonds go up in that situation.

But then you’re right. When the money comes to, you’re going to be reinvesting at lower rates. And then over time that will, will get go down a bit. If you are worried about a recession, I would say, go up in quality, stick to treasuries, investment grade, the higher quality, even munis, the higher quality asset classes that you don’t have to worry about as much default risk and volatility if we do have a coming recession.

Barry Ritholtz: I know you’re the strategist for iShares, which issues a lot of ETFs. When I first started in the 1990s, bond ladders were all individually owned papers and separately managed accounts. Everything was hand-selected. The minimums were pretty high. The cost structure was pretty high. The state of the art stayed that way for decades.

It seems to have gotten a whole lot better, cheaper, faster, easier today. Tell us, what is the state of the art building a bond ladder using ETFs?

Karen Verra: I think this is one of the innovations that has really come about in the last decade. No longer do you have to have a million dollars to create a bespoke bond ladder with an SMA manager.

You can do it today for very little amounts of money. And so what we’ve seen is our I bonds have been popular inside smaller account sizes. If you’ve got, you know, a one-off account over here, or even if you have a lot of money, it’s just a very efficient way to do that. So our I bonds ETFs are term maturity ETFs. They have a maturity date, typically each December and they’re holding bonds that mature throughout the calendar year. And then when the last bond matures, The ETF will delist from the exchange and you’ll have cash hitting your account, just like a bond maturity. And we’ve got them now in treasuries, tips, munis investment grade and high yield. So five different sectors of the bond market.

And then we’ve seen people really customize things for their income needs for their tax status. And they’re, they’re getting exposed to hundreds of bonds in a single ETF, as opposed to what we see with a lot of SMAs – is they might be limited to maybe 20 to 30 bonds at the most. So you’re getting diversification at a very low cost. And because they are exchange traded, if you change your mind and want to sell them, you can at any point where a lot of times with a bond, it’s really easy to buy it, but then maybe when you go to sell it, it’s hard to find a buyer or there’s large transaction costs associated with that.

Barry Ritholtz: So I’m hearing diversification, lower costs, liquidity, you mentioned they all, the ETF will mature at the end of the year, so you have a defined maturity, obviously no callable bonds go into that.

But it seems working with an ETF gives you – I’m doing a little bit of a commercial here, but my firm uses a lot of ETFs, we’re very happy with them, you get a lot of flexibility and professional management – this really seems to be much better than the bad old days when someone was handpicking dozens of individual bonds.

Karen Verra: We still see people who are preferring that, let’s say you have special, you’re in a high-tech state and you want a special SMA dedicated to that. So we see people even using our iBonds alongside SMAs or alongside other strategies.

Or maybe they’re whittling those down. Like we don’t tell people go out and sell your bond portfolio. You’re curated over decades. However, this is a great strategy, I think, to provide some liquidity, diversification, and low cost access to these different parts of the bond market.

Barry Ritholtz: One of the advantages of working with various large firms like yourself, iShares, Fidelity, Schwab, whoever. You have a variety of online tools to build your own bond ladder. Tell us a little bit about what people can find if they want to just do it themselves.

Karen Verra: If you go to iShares.com backslash iBonds, you’ll find our landing page and there’s a link to our iBonds ladder tool. And we designed this to be just like a report that you would get if you went to a bond manager and asked for a bond ladder, you can input your dollar amount, you can check the box on which sectors of the bond market you want to be invested in, and there’s even a slider where you can look at your maturities.

And right away, it will give you an equal-weighted ladder. You can then customize that ladder. If you’d like, you can delete things you don’t want, and it will have some summary characteristics, the number of bonds, the duration, the yield, the cost, and I think it’s a, it’s a great way to just visualize those yields.

Like we have people who will come in and they want to know what different Maturities of the bond market are yielding. They can go in and look in, see where the treasury curve is, the investment grade curve, the high yield curve. And I think it’s just a great source of information to even go in and see what the different parts of the market are yielding.

Barry Ritholtz: So to sum up, investors that are looking for yield but are concerned about interest rates going up, down, and all over the place can solve for that problem by creating a ladder of bond ETFs, spreading it out over five to 10 years. So their interest rate risk is reduced. They’re locking in rates now and if rates go higher as things mature, they can reinvest it.

And if rates go down, hey, well, at least you locked in a higher rate for the first half of that, um, of those investments. It seems to make a lot of sense and especially if you’re working towards a specific liability or a specific goal, uh, where you have an obligation down the road, this allows you with very little risk to hit those targets.

Karen Verra: That’s right. We, we’re seeing. all kinds of investors using them for, for different goals and objectives, different, different terms. And I think it really empowers people to do it themselves and invest in the bond market.

Barry Ritholtz: Thank you, Karen. This has been really interesting. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to at the money on Bloomberg radio.

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