Fixed Income Portfolio

As we mentioned in the video about our portfolio philosophy, we talked about the breakdown that we use between fixed income and equity. Let's talk about the fixed income side. On the fixed income side, we tend to use bond mutual funds, fixed income mutual funds to deliver the fixed income component. The reason we do that is that we feel like in the long term the fixed income portion should represent the safety of your portfolio. There are certain types of bonds, certain types of bond funds, that actually have nearly as much risk as the overall equity market but not nearly as much of the potential return that the equity market can deliver for you. So we want to make sure on the fixed income side that we're not taking any more risk than we absolutely have to. We know that that's there to represent the safety. It's a necessary evil that we're going to have money there that is better protected even though we know that we're probably not going to make as much in the long run. So we use mutual funds because we just don't feel like you get the best individual bonds that are available as the average consumer. If you think about it, imagine if you were an institutional bond salesman and you just had a hundred million dollar bond offering. In that hundred million dollar bond offering, who's the first person you're going to call? You're not going to call somebody who's going to buy maybe five or ten thousand dollars of that bond. You're going to call somebody like an insurance company or a mutual fund company that you work very closely with that's going to buy 25 or 50% of that entire bond offering because it's the best thing available in the market place. These are professional bond buyers. These buyers know how to shop for the best maturities; for the best coupons, and our chances of out doing those people as consumers, basically, what you're getting is what's left over. They've already picked the best of the breed out of what's available in the bond market and what's left for individual bond buyers is everything that they didn't want to buy. We don't think that's attractive. The other problem that we have with individual bonds are even though you may have a government bond or a high rated bond that might have long maturities, I've been in this business long enough to see different interest rate cycles and I can tell you, you're not going to want to look at that statement for the next 20 or 30 years if that bond valuation goes down 10 or 20% even though we'll tell you that at the end of the maturity period you get all your money back. You don't want to look at that statement for long periods of time where you got a loss in that bond if you sell it. So, we like to use the mutual funds because we think you get a better bond to start with and you get better overall performance in those bonds than what we think you can get from individual bonds.

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