While most of the world’s attention has been on the China market meltdown and the Greek debt showdown, closed-end bond funds have quietly been priced to deliver solid total returns over the next 12-18 months. To take advantage of this pricing, I have carved out an 8%-10% allocation to closed-end bond funds in my Dividend Growth Portfolio .
With the Fed’s looming rate hike casting a shadow over the bond market, many high-quality closed-end bond funds are trading at their deepest discounts to NAV since the 2013 “taper tantrum,” and some are approaching levels last seen during the 2008 meltdown. Starting at these levels, I expect a portfolio of closed-end bond funds to deliver total returns (income + capital gains) of 15%-20% over the next 12-18 months.
With any closed-end mutual fund, you have only three potential drivers of returns:
UK interest rate rise billed for new year, warns Bank of England
Mark Carney says first increase since height of financial crisis is becoming increasingly necessary as economic growth strengthens
Britain has been put on alert to expect its first interest rate rise since the global financial crash at around the turn of the year as the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, warned that the long period of 0.5% borrowing costs was coming to an end.
Carney told businesses and consumers that Threadneedle Street would have to respond to the economy’s stronger growth by announcing the first tightening of policy since rates were increased to 5.75% in July 2007 – the month before the US subprime mortgage crisis erupted.
New York is building one of the biggest Ferris wheels in the world, and it's partly funded by Chinese investors hoping for U.S. green cards.
The wheel, under construction on Staten Island, will stand 630 feet high when it's completed in two years, according to Travis Noyes, chief marketing officer at New York Wheel, the firm developing it. Its 36 pods will hold about 40 people each, offering panoramic views of the New York skyline during a slow rotation.
Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes is the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
When she was a sophomore at Stanford in 2003, Holmes founded healthcare-technology company Theranos (a few months later, she dropped out to focus on the company). Today, she has a net worth of $4.6 billion.
Theranos is a $9 billion biotech company that has a new approach to blood testing. Its goal is to make clinical testing cheaper and faster.
Theranos wants to conduct blood tests for health issues through a single finger stick rather than by having to draw vials of blood in a doctor's office. Theranos has drawn skepticism from the scientific community in part because Theranos is cagey about how its tests actually work.
But for now, Holmes is on top of the world. Already, her blood tests are being offered in some drugstores like Walgreens.
“We will go door to door in Perama, saying to people that we’re fighting,” said Babis, an Open Assembly founder who declined to give his last name. “Then we will reach other communities all over Greece. We will protest by the mayor’s office. We will go to Athens.”
The paradox is that people are as desperate as ever for affordable rental housing. But every child learns early in life that there’s a difference between wanting something and having the means to obtain it. It’s a tough lesson, but fundamental to economic life. Without money, your demand for something is “ineffective,” to use the economic term.
One of the major destabilizing forces in the Chinese stock market is the lack of institutional investors.
In the common imagination, at least on the Continent, if not in the UK, the European project is about "peace".
In the aftermath of the World War Two, the driving impetus was how to avoid Europe ever going to war again.
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