to Sell Treasury Bonds
September 27, 2011
Bill Gross made headlines in February by asserting that U.S. Treasury bonds were not providing enough yield to make them worth the risk and reducing his allocation to zero in the PIMCO Total Return Fund (institutional share class PTTRX). The subsequent rally forced him to admit his mistake in August, but by then his fund was trailing 90% of its peers and having its worst year since 1995. I will examine Gross’ February decision in retrospect, to illustrate its tactical and strategic costs and benefits for his shareholders.
With approximately $245 billion in assets, PTTRX is the world’s largest fund and Gross’ moves are watched closely on every bond market desk. Some might consider him the personification of the bond market vigilante. Did Gross make the classic error of trying to ‘fight the Fed’? Did he forget Keynes’ famous adage that ‘the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent’? Or was his reasoning simply flawed?
An article that follows the evolution of Gross’ strategy from earlier this month provided an overview of the situation. Gross said that Treasury bonds were providing low yield for the interest-rate risk associated with those bonds. In contrast, the risk in corporate bonds is primarily credit risk. He looked at the relative yield-to-risk across fixed income investments and concluded that credit risk in corporate bonds was better compensated than interest rate risk in Treasury bonds.
To pursue this strategy, Gross reduced its exposure to Treasury bonds and invested heavily in corporate bonds. His positioning was a tactical bet that interest rates could not remain at their near-historical lows. As we all know with hindsight, rates could and did stay this low—and even went lower.
Let’s look closely at Gross’ decision to bet against Treasury bonds by applying a series of statistical tools to the data that was available to Gross in February 2011.
Analysis of PTTRX
The table below compares PTTRX to a number of core fixed-income asset classes, represented with ETFs. The calculations are shown using data available through February 2011 to see whether these measures would have provided any warnings of the coming rally in Treasury bonds and relatively poor performance in corporate bonds
PTTRX is classified as an intermediate-bond index, and the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate Bond Index is the common benchmark. The ETF that tracks this index is AGG.
PIMCO Total Return Fund vs. Fixed Income Assets (three years through Feb 2011)
|
Ticker |
Correlation to |
Beta vs. |
Volatility |
R^2 vs. |
PIMCO Total Return Fund |
PTTRX |
100% |
9% |
5% |
17% |
20+ Year Treasuries |
TLT |
39% |
-15% |
18% |
3% |
7-10 Year Treasuries |
IEF |
47% |
-7% |
9% |
3% |
1-3 Year Treasuries |
SHY |
27% |
-2% |
2% |
11% |
Corporate Bonds |
LQD |
87% |
21% |
12% |
14% |
High Yield Corporate Bonds |
HYG |
60% |
66% |
19% |
56% |
Aggregate Bond Index |
AGG |
80% |
6% |
5% |
5% |
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