Bond ETFs as a means to achieve risk parity
How is it possible that long term treasury bonds, which the government has never defaulted on, can hold more risk as an ETF then the stock market index? The risk from long-term bonds isn't that the government defaults, but that interest rates go up before you get paid, so investors want bonds issued more recently at higher interest rates, rather than your older bonds that pay at a lower rate (so the price for your bonds goes down). This is usually caused by higher inflation rates which reduce the value of the interest that you will be paid. Do you assume more risk investing in bond ETFs than you would investing in individual bonds? If you are choosing the right ETFs, there should be a lower amount of risk because the ETFs are taking care of the difficult work of buying a variety of bonds.  Are bond ETFs an appropriate investment vehicle for risk diversification? Yes, if you are investing in bonds, exchange traded funds are an appropriate way to buy them. The markets for ETFs are usually very liquid.
"There's actually a lot of smaller questions in your question, so I'll answer just a few here. The standard bond index for high yield corporates is the Barclays Capital High Yield Corporate index, which is the basis for JNK.  I am not familiar with the index behind HYG, the ""iBoxx $ Liquid High Yield index."" The ETFs are managed quantitatively to try to track the index as closely as possible.  AFAIK these ETFs do not attempt to take active positions. New issues are typically purchased with cash which is constantly coming in from interest and principal payments from other bonds.  There is rarely a need to sell bonds just to buy new issues.  Selling bonds is more common when a fund is experiencing redemptions. These ETFs and the high yield bonds they buy are not derivatives (your question seems to be confused on that point). The US Treasury is not directly involved in any way.  They are indirectly involved, as they are indirectly involved in US equities markets or world markets for that matter, although perhaps they have greater influence in the bond world. Moody's has extensive studies of default rates by ratings." A bond fund has a 5% yield. You can take 1/.05 and think of it as a 20 P/E.  I wouldn't, because no one else does, really. An individual bond has a coupon yield, and a YTM, yield to maturity. A bond fund or ETF usually won't have a maturity, only a yield. This is great. Thanks! So, just assuming a fund happened to average out to libor plus 50 for a given year, would applying that rate to the notional value of the index swaps provide a reasonable estimate of the drag an ETF investor would experience due to the cost associated with the index swaps?  For instance, applying this to the hypothetical I linked to in the original question, they assumed fund assets of $100M with 2x leverage achieved through $85M of S&amp;P500 stocks, $25M of S&amp;P500 futures, and a notional value of the S&amp;P500 swaps at $90M. So the true costs to an ETF investor would be: expense ratio + commissions on the $85M of S&amp;P500 holdings + costs associated with $25M of futures contracts + costs associated with the $90M of swaps? And the costs associated with the $90M of swaps might be roughly libor plus 50? "As Michael Pryor answered, a bond fund is a mutual fund that invests in bonds. I'd also consider an ETF based on bonds to be a bond fund, but I'm not sure that all investors would consider these as ""bond funds"". Not all bond funds are the same -- just like stock funds. You can classify bond funds based on the issuer of the bonds: You can also classify funds based on the time to maturity: In general, bond funds have lower risk and lower expected return than stock funds. Sometimes bond funds have price movements that are not tightly correlated to the price movements in the equity markets. This can make them a decent hedge against declines in your equity investments. See Michal Pryor's answer for some info on how you can get tax free treatment for your bond fund investments." In the strictest sense, there are bills,notes, and bonds, named when issued based on their time to maturity. Even though it's called a bond ETF it may have a duration short enough to be made of T-bills, less than a year to maturity.  Simply put, for bonds, risk comes from the duration, time to maturity. For a time period as short as a matter of months, commercial paper or bonds about to mature are the highest returning investments, as defined by Benjamin Graham:  An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative. There are no well-known methods that can be applied to cryptocurrencies or forex for such short time periods to promise safety of principal. The problem is that with $1,500, it will be impossible to buy any worthy credit directly and hold to maturity; besides, the need for liquidity eats up the return, risk-adjusted.  The only alternative is a bond ETF which has a high probability of getting crushed as interest rates continue to rise, so that fails the above criteria. The only alternative for investment now is a short term deposit with a bank. For speculation, anything goes... The best strategy is to take the money and continue to build up a financial structure: saving for risk-adjusted and time-discounted future annual cash flows.  After the average unemployment cycle is funded, approximately six or so years, then long-term investments should be accumulated, internationally diversified equities. I'm assuming you are buying bond mutual funds or bond etfs here, not the actual bonds directly. There are a significant variety of different types of bond funds, reflecting the sort of bonds they invest in. For example, you can invest in risky, non-commercial grade bonds, also known as junk bonds. Or you can invest in short-term bonds, which are much safer but return much less. There's no such thing as the 'average bond'. So, let's go for somewhere in the middle. Let's go for 3% return, after fees. Now, it's fairly simple math. You want $3,000 a month, or $36,000 a year. To generate that sort of return, you'd need to invest $1,200,000. If we are more optimistic, we could go for a 4% return, after fees. That reduces your investment to $900,000. Note that it would almost certainly not make sense to invest all that money in bonds. Instead, you'd want to invest in a mix of stocks and bonds. This could likely reduce your risk while increasing your expected return. I am not aware of a single instrument that encapsulates what you are after; but the components do exist. At least in Canada, there are many Options traded on the Montreal Exchange that are based on Toronto ETFs.  All the standard TSX ETFs are represented, as well as some of the more exotic.  With a regular investment account approved for Options you should be able to do what you want. In a parallel vein, there are also double down and up ETFs.  One such example are the Horizons BetaPro series of ETFs.  They are designed to return double the market up or down on a daily basis and reset daily.  They do need to be watched closely, however. Good Luck "There are two umbrellas in investing: active management and passive management. Passive management is based on the idea ""you can't beat the market."" Passive investors believe in the efficient markets hypothesis: ""the market interprets all information about an asset, so price is equal to underlying value"". Another idea in this field is that there's a minimum risk associated with any given return. You can't increase your expected return without assuming more risk. To see it graphically:   As expected return goes up, so does risk. If we stat with a portfolio of 100 bonds, then remove 30 bonds and add 30 stocks, we'll have a portfolio that's 70% bonds/30% stocks. Turns out that this makes expected return increase and lower risk because of diversification. Markowitz showed that you could reduce the overall portfolio risk by adding a riskier, but uncorrelated, asset! Basically, if your entire portfolio is US stocks, then you'll lose money whenever US stocks fall. But, if you have half US stocks, quarter US bonds, and quarter European stocks, then even if the US market tanks, half your portfolio will be unaffected (theoretically). Adding different types of uncorrelated assets can reduce risk and increase returns.  Let's tie this all together. We should get a variety of stocks to reduce our risk, and we can't beat the market by security selection. Ideally, we ought to buy nearly every stock in the market so that  So what's our solution? Why, the exchange traded fund (ETF) of course! An ETF is basically a bunch of stocks that trade as a single ticker symbol. For example, consider the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY). You can purchase a unit of ""SPY"" and it will move up/down proportional to the S&P 500. This gives us diversification among stocks, to prevent any significant downside while limiting our upside. How do we diversify across asset classes? Luckily, we can purchase ETF's for almost anything: Gold ETF's (commodities), US bond ETF's (domestic bonds), International stock ETFs, Intl. bonds ETFs, etc. So, we can buy ETF's to give us exposure to various asset classes, thus diversifying among asset classes and within each asset class. Determining what % of our portfolio to put in any given asset class is known as asset allocation and some people say up to 90% of portfolio returns can be determined by asset allocation.  That pretty much sums up passive management. The idea is to buy ETFs across asset classes and just leave them. You can readjust your portfolio holdings periodically, but otherwise there is no rapid trading. Now the other umbrella is active management. The unifying idea is that you can generate superior returns by stock selection. Active investors reject the idea of efficient markets.  A classic and time proven strategy is value investing. After the collapse of 07/08, bank stocks greatly fell, but all the other stocks fell with them. Some stocks worth $100 were selling for $50. Value investors quickly snapped up these stocks because they had a margin of safety. Even if the stock didn't go back to 100, it could go up to $80 or $90 eventually, and investors profit. The main ideas in value investing are: have a big margin of safety, look at a company's fundamentals (earnings, book value, etc), and see if it promises adequate return. Coke has tremendous earnings and it's a great company, but it's so large that you're never going to make 20% profits on it annually, because it just can't grow that fast. Another field of active investing is technical analysis. As opposed to the ""fundamental analysis"" of value investing, technical analysis involves looking at charts for patterns, and looking at stock history to determine future paths. Things like resistance points and trend lines also play a role. Technical analysts believe that stocks are just ticker symbols and that you can use guidelines to predict where they're headed.  Another type of active investing is day trading. This basically involves buying and selling stocks every hour or every minute or just at a rapid pace. Day traders don't hold onto investments for very long, and are always trying to predict the market in the short term and take advantage of it. Many individual investors are also day traders.  The other question is, how do you choose a strategy? The short answer is: pick whatever works for you. The long answer is: Day trading and technical analysis is a lot of luck. If there are consistent systems for trading , then people are keeping them secret, because there is no book that you can read and become a consistent trader. High frequency trading (HFT) is an area where people basically mint money, but it s more technology and less actual investing, and would not be categorized as day trading.  Benjamin Graham once said: In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine. Value investing will work because there's evidence for it throughout history, but you need a certain temperament for it and most people don't have that. Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to adequately study stocks, and people with day jobs can't devote that kind of time. So there you have it. This is my opinion and by no means definitive, but I hope you have a starting point to continue your study. I included the theory in the beginning because there are too many monkeys on CNBC and the news who just don't understand fundamental economics and finance, and there's no sense in applying a theory until you can understand why it works and when it doesn't." Notes and Bonds sell at par (1.0). When rates go up, their value goes down. When rates go down, their value goes up. As an individual investor, you really don't have any business buying individual bonds unless you are holding them to maturity. Buy a short-duration bond fund or ETF. In a word, yes. You can buy very low cost index ETFs, like VTI, VEA, BND, FBND and rebalance in proportion to your age and risk tolerance. Minimal management and low cost. "Not a bond holder, but when we get dividends we usually just buy up a benchmark index tracking ETF unless/until we're ready to rebalance our portfolio. Most of the trades in the day are earmarked with the reason ""spending cash"". I'd assume it's similar for bond holders and coupons." Perfect competition would not be the outcome you want from this model, nor does it imply what you posit. It implies that there will be infinitely many firms, with free entry/exit, making zero profits. Bonds would then become a reason for exit if you had heterogeneous firms (but in perfect competition this is unlikely). In fact in equilibrium no would (probably) issue bonds. What it seems like you want is some sort of structured oligopoly, or a regulated cartel separated into regions. This might generate the bond market you have in mind, but it still does not take into account the relative risk of the bonds. "There are some index funds out there like this - generally they are called ""equal weight"" funds.  For example, the Rydex S&P Equal-Weight ETF.  Rydex also has several other equal weight sector funds" It looks like you need a lot more education on the subject. I suggest you pick up a book on investing and portfolio management to get a first idea. Dividend yields are currently way below 5% on blue chips. Unlike coupons from fixed income instruments (which, in the same risk category, pay a lot less), dividend yields are not guaranteed and neither is the invested principal amount.  In either case, your calculation is far away from reality.  Sure, there are investments (such as the mentioned direct investments in companies or housings in emerging economies) that can potentially earn you two digit percentage returns. Just remember: risk always goes both ways. A higher earning potential means higher loss potential. Also, a direct investment is a lot less liquid than an investment on a publicly quoted high turnover market place. If you suddenly need money, you really don't want to be pressed to sell real estate in an emerging market (keyword: bid ask spread). My advice: the money that you can set aside for the long term (10 years plus), invest it in stock ETFs, globally. Everything else should be invested in bond funds or even deposits, depending on when you will need the access. As others have pointed out, consider getting professional advice.