Bonds. James Bonds.

By -

Well, happy Sunday Slope. Yesterday was an absolutely amazingly beautiful day here in Nashville. I think we were in the mid-80’s, and nothing but clear blue skies. I spent the day going into downtown Nashville to enjoy being outside. It was so nice to see Nashville bustling with masses of maskless people once again just enjoying life. (Editor’s note: agreed! On and on the plane! What a pleasure!)

In today’s article we’re going to take a look at my new friend, TLT. For those of you that have never traded TLT before, it is an ETF that tracks the long end of the US Treasury bond curve. It looks at bonds of 20 years and longer. Not exactly a high flying tech stock, eh? It’ll pay the bills.

In the daily chart above you can see how TLT performed over the past decade. As the price of TLT rises, the yield falls. As the price of TLT falls, the yield of the bond is rising. Make sense? TLT peaked in March of 2020 and has been falling ever since. And, as the world has witnessed… rates have been rising. But, have interest rates peaked for the time being, and is it time to buy TLT?

As I have done in the past, I’ll first point us back to the gold to interest rate analog. This analog is one of Tom McClellan’s, and has shown a similar relationship to the gold to crude oil analog with a slightly longer lag time. I have circled where we are on the analog currently. And, yep… we’re right at the top. What this analog is telling you is that interest rates, i.e. U.S. Treasury bond yields, are forecast to fall for the remainder of 2022.
So, if we are knocking around an important top in interest rates, how can we profit off of that knowledge for the remainder of the year? First, let’s discuss the entry. The chart above shows the monthly negative standard deviation levels for TLT. We traded below -SD2 every day last week. This is telling that risk to the downside for TLT is low for the rest of the month of April. There is a 95.44% chance that TLT finishes the month above -SD2, which is at 121.02. Given the intensity of the recent plunge in TLT, this information gives me some confidence to go ahead and enter long, which I am.

This year’s stock market is going to be framed by the need to manage money differently. TLT is not going to be a high flying 300% winner, but will likely offer 20% gains over the course of the next six months. I’ll take it.