Bankrate follows a strict editorial policy, so you can trust that we’re putting your interests first. Our award-winning editors and reporters create honest and accurate content to help you make the right financial decisions.
Key Principles
We value your trust. Our mission is to provide readers with accurate and unbiased information, and we have editorial standards in place to ensure that happens. Our editors and reporters thoroughly fact-check editorial content to ensure the information you’re reading is accurate. We maintain a firewall between our advertisers and our editorial team. Our editorial team does not receive direct compensation from our advertisers.
Editorial Independence
Bankrate’s editorial team writes on behalf of YOU – the reader. Our goal is to give you the best advice to help you make smart personal finance decisions. We follow strict guidelines to ensure that our editorial content is not influenced by advertisers. Our editorial team receives no direct compensation from advertisers, and our content is thoroughly fact-checked to ensure accuracy. So, whether you’re reading an article or a review, you can trust that you’re getting credible and dependable information.
You have money questions. Bankrate has answers. Our experts have been helping you master your money for over four decades. We continually strive to provide consumers with the expert advice and tools needed to succeed throughout life’s financial journey.
Bankrate follows a strict editorial policy, so you can trust that our content is honest and accurate. Our award-winning editors and reporters create honest and accurate content to help you make the right financial decisions. The content created by our editorial staff is objective, factual, and not influenced by our advertisers.
We’re transparent about how we are able to bring quality content, competitive rates, and useful tools to you by explaining how we make money.
Bankrate.com is an independent, advertising-supported publisher and comparison service. We are compensated in exchange for placement of sponsored products and, services, or by you clicking on certain links posted on our site. Therefore, this compensation may impact how, where and in what order products appear within listing categories. Other factors, such as our own proprietary website rules and whether a product is offered in your area or at your self-selected credit score range can also impact how and where products appear on this site. While we strive to provide a wide range offers, Bankrate does not include information about every financial or credit product or service.
The Federal Reserve has signaled that it is likely to start raising interest rates this year. Bond investors have been expecting this eventuality for several years, but this time it looks like an impending reality.
What action should you take as a bond investor to best manage your bond portfolio in the face of rising interest rates? Bonds tend to be sensitive to rate changes. This is especially true of bond funds, which get a double whammy when skittish investors flee, leaving fund managers scrambling to redeem shares at the wrong time.
Remember: Bonds will decline in value, but their moves tend to be small compared with other securities.
“One thing that investors need to understand about the high-quality, fixed-income market is that our market is dominated by institutional players who are often insensitive to the level of interest rates,” says Pramod Atluri, co-manager of the Fidelity Total Bond exchange-traded fund.
A lot of these institutional investors are flooding into U.S. Treasury bonds, making the so-called flight to quality, because the U.S. looks better relative to other economies worldwide.
This higher demand means that the Federal Reserve’s actions aimed at raising short-term interest rates, which it directly influences, are less likely to have an impact higher up the yield curve on medium- or longer-term bonds, where rates are influenced more by investor expectations, says Atluri.
Share