Sonal Desai runs Franklin Templeton Fixed Income. She finds ample opportunities for income in the second half. You find ample opportunities to check your Robinhood account at 3 AM and cry into a pillowcase that smells like Cheetos.
The bond landscape shifts. That's what bonds do. They shift. Sometimes yields go up. Sometimes they go down. Desai gets paid seven figures to notice this and buy the ones that pay more money. She went to college for this. She studied duration and convexity and yield curves. You watched a TikTok about treasury ETFs and now you're leveraged 3x in a vehicle you can't pronounce.
Here's what finding ample opportunities means in Franklin Templeton language: bonds exist that pay interest, and she's buying them. That's the strategy. Buy the things that pay you money instead of the things that don't pay you money. Revolutionary stuff. They'll probably write this up in the CFA curriculum.
The article doesn't say which bonds. Doesn't name a single security. Doesn't mention a country or a sector or a maturity date. Just opportunities. Ample ones. In the second half. As opposed to the first half when apparently there were no opportunities and Desai just sat in her office playing Minesweeper and collecting her bonus.
Retail traders will read this headline and think they've unlocked alpha. They'll Google "how to buy bonds" and end up in a Reddit thread where someone recommends a leveraged muni ETF because it worked great in 2019. Three weeks later they'll be posting screenshots with the caption "I thought bonds were supposed to be safe" while down 18% on something that was explicitly designed to lose money when rates move.
Desai finds opportunities. You find ways to turn a 4% yielding asset into a 12% loss through sheer force of incompetence.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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