Junk bonds: apocalypse postponed

Investors were selling in droves last year and in early 2016. But now they’re back with a vengeance. US high-yield, or junk, bonds, the riskiest segment of the corporate credit market, are among the best-performing major assets this year.

Investors were selling in droves last year and in early 2016. But now they're back with a vengeance. US high-yield, or junk, bonds, the riskiest segment of the corporate credit market, are among the best-performing major assets this year. They have produced a total return of more than 7%. Energy-sector junk bonds, which were in particular trouble due to the oil-price slump, have notched up 15%.

As prices have rebounded, US junk-bond yields have fallen back to 7%, below the 8.5% average of the past ten years. At the peak of the junk-bond boom of recent years, yields fell below 6%. In total return terms, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch high-yield index is almost back to its all-time highs seen last year.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.