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Larry Swedroe, the author of The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need, has collaborated with Joe H. Hempen to create an up-to-date book on how to invest in today's bond market that covers a range of issues pertinent to any bond capitalist today including: bond-speak, the risks of fixed income investing, mortgage-backed securities, and municipal bonds. The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You'll Ever Need is a no-nonsense handbook with all the selective information necessary to design and construct your fixed income portfolio. In this day and age of shaky stocks and economic unpredictability, The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You'll Ever Need is a primary tool for any capitalist looking to safeguard their money.

"One of the outstanding untold tragedies of innovative finance is the mayhem wreaked upon an unsuspecting public in the bond markets. Whether you're a little capitalist or an institutional player, the odds are that not only have you been savaged by this machine, but that you don't even recognise it. Few persons recognise fixed income investing as well as Larry Swedroe; "The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need" will steer you through these dangerous waters in safety and comfort." --Bill Bernstein, author of The Four Pillars of Investing, The Intelligent Asset Allocator, and The Birth of Plenty

"There's an ol' saying in personal finance and investing: 'You build wealth in stocks, and you preserve it in bonds." Well, here's a book that offers the best of both worlds! These guys show you how bonds may not only preserve your wealth, they may help you build wealth too!" --Paul B. Farrell, JD, PhD, columnist, CBS MarketWatch, author of The Millionaire Code, Lazy Person's Guide to Investing, The Winning Portfolio, and others

"A bond book for our time. Clearly, given that most financial observers believe the equity premium is going to decline over the foreseeable future making bonds a comparatively better investment, we need to commence focusing more on bonds as an investment vehicle. This book provides an splendid roadmap of the bond markets and bonds as a personal investment." --Edward R. Wolfe, Ph. D., Professor of Finance, and Director of the Financial Planning Program, Western Kentucky University

"A MUCH NEEDED BOND BOOK. In The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You'll Ever Need, the writers cover the very complex issue of bonds in great detail. This book is a must-read for any individual who's thinking of investing in bonds and actually wants to comprehend what they're all about. Readers will likewise gain clear or deep perception into how the bond market works. I feel each bond capitalist could gain from reading this book; I know I did. This book unquestionably must be a percentage of each bond investor's library." --Mel Lindauer, Forum Leader, Morningstar's Vanguard Diehards Forum and co-author, The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

"This to an outstanding degree clear and well-organized book covers just when it comes to everything the typical capitalist needs to recognise when it comes to bonds and other fixed income securities. A real pleasure to read." --Kenneth R. French, Carl E. and Catherine M. Heidt Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

"Bonds and other types of fixed income investments are very complex and difficult to understand. Larry Swedroe and Joseph Hempen have collaborated in a book in regards to bonds and fixed income investments that even I may understand. In their easy-to-read manner, they take us through the respective fixed-income investments and tell us how and why each security may or may not be suitable for our portfolio. The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You'll Ever Need is destined to become a bond book classic." --Taylor Larimore, Dean of the Morningstar Vanguard Diehard Forum, co-author of BogleheadsGuide to Investing

"At a heap of point -- perhaps soon -- the Federal Reserve will stop raising interest rates, a decision that is bound to add to the allure of bonds, because bond prices rise as rates fall.
To cater to the potential growing demand for information, Larry E. Swedroe and Joseph H. Hempen, principals at Buckingham Asset Management, an investment firm based in St. Louis, have put together an splendid primer: "The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You'll Ever Need" (Truman Talley, $25.95)....they cover the bases exceedingly well. Even better, they lay out a scheme for investing in bonds that will make sense for most people:
-Buy bonds with the most eminent ratings, or invest in bond mutual funds that do.
-Buy bonds with short to intermediate maturities. "Holding sum totals with a maturity of in regards to one to two years is the prudent system for those investors wishing to maximize the risk-reward relationship," the writers write.
-Avoid buying hybrid securities -- like convertible bonds and preferent stocks -- because their risks outweigh their potential rewards.
-Don't undertake to time the market. "Buy and hold" is the safest approach, as with stocks." --The New York Times, Sunday Business Section, 3/5/06
"Coming up with a bond system takes time, but it's time well spent. Because the same instruments that are sold as safe and secure hedges versus disturb may bite you if you're keeping the faulty kind in the wrong way and interest rates turn.
A couple of St. Louis financial advisers, Larry Swedroe and Joseph Hempen, have written a straightforward book to address all of those choices.
The Only Guide To A Winning Bond Strategy You'll Ever Need, to be published in March by St. Martin's Press, may sound a bit hyperbolic.
But it's noteworthy because at least one of the authors, Swedroe, has a reputation as an exponent of the "you can't beat the market" system of belief and the inexpensive stock index-fund investing that specifically goes with it.
He distinctively tells clients that they shouldn't undertake to beat the market, but rather will have to hold diversified portfolios of low-cost stock funds for years and years. So it's worth seeing how such a system of belief would translate to bonds.
...[It] is likewise informative and direct when it comes to making bond investment choices." --Linda Stern (Freelance writer), published on Reuters.com and in Jackson News-Tribune

"You create wealth with stocks; you preserve it with bonds.
Those of us on the wrong side of 50 are starting to remunerate more attention to an asset class that just doesn't get the respect it merits: fixed income.
A few weeks back, we brought up the recent publication of a Canadian-focused primer on bonds: Hank Cunningham's In Your Best Interest.
I cited such books are rare equated to the glut of material on the more glamorous subject of stocks and equity funds. Barely was the ink arid on that column when another bond book came through the transom, from an author I've read and valued for a great deal of time: Larry Swedroe.
Swedroe is one of those indexing evangelists who has made the case for indexing equities in such prior books as What Wall Street Doesn't Want You to Know and The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need. (St.Martin's Press, New York, 2001 and 2005).
I guess Larry's that much closer to retirement now because he's when it comes to to release his fifth investment book and it's focalized on bonds. He has teamed up with collaborator Joseph Hempen to write The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You'll Ever Need. The publication date is March 7.
Judging from the endorsement the book got from personal finance writer Jane Bryant Quinn -- "The bond book for our times" -- this one is destined for strong sales. Unlike Cunningham's book, Swedroe's is aimed at American investors. Thus, sure chapters -- like the one on tax-exempt municipal bonds -- aren't of much relevance to Canadian investors. (More's the pity).
Swedroe lists three reasons to include bonds in portfolios: for liquidity to meet unexpected expenses; to reduce portfolio risk; and to create streams of income to meet ongoing expenses.
He then lists the rules of prudent fixed-income investing: buy only investment-grade bonds rated AA or better; keep away from long-term bonds by restricting yourself to bonds with maturities that are short- to intermediate-term; keep away from attempting to guess interest rates or find mispriced securities; keep out of the way of hybrid securities such as preferent stocks or convertible bonds; and invest only in low-cost vehicles.
You'll note both the special and significant stress on low costs and the point with regards to avoiding market timing reinforces Swedroe's long-established indexing bona fides.
Like Cunningham, Swedroe is critical of how brokerage houses price bonds and disclose broker compensation. Swedroe thinks investors will have to keep out of the way of buying person bonds from banks or brokerage firms because of huge invisible mark-ups and because brokers trade for the most part what they have in inventory and wish to dispose of.
Swedroe devotes the early chapters to an overview of how the bond market works and the risks that attend it. He scrutinizes how bonds are priced for syndication investors and surveys the dominant species inhabiting the fixed income
landscape: government bonds, corporates, international bonds, mortgage-backed securities, cash market funds, certificates of deposit (we call these GICs in Canada), and inflation-indexed securities. The latter include U.S. specific iBonds and TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities), versions of which are called real return bonds in Canada.
But the key chapter is the penultimate eleventh one, which explains how to design and fabricate a fixed-income portfolio. Here Swedroe looks at the pros and cons of owning bonds through mutual funds or exchange-traded funds, keeping person securities directly or owning bonds in separately managed accounts.
Like Cunningham, Swedroe devotes substantial time to laddering bonds with dissimilar maturities. This he describe as "a prudent tactical approach to portfolio construction" that both cuts costs and lets investors remainder price risk and reinvestment risk. He likewise looks at tax efficacy and asset emplacement (as opposed to asset allocation) and describes the importance of getting a financial advisor to craft an Investment Policy Statement (IPS). He proposes investors construct a discerned Fixed-Income IPS that focuses on investment vehicles, intermediate maturities, minimum worthy of acceptance or satisfactory credit ratings and greatest or most complete or best possible portion to any one type of debt instrument.
In a canned "interview" the publishers include in a press kit, Swedroe says he wrote the book because "fixed income is a neglected investment tool." As I'd noted when I reviewed Cunningham's book, Swedroe says "there are hundreds of books out there on stocks, far less available on fixed income." Too some investors overlook the asset class. That's a fault because "it's an necessary part of a hea...