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How Do Bonds Work?

Table of Contents

BondSavvy is dedicated to educating investors.  We want to empower you to understand how corporate bonds work so you can benefit from the strong returns and relative safety individual corporate bonds can provide.  It all starts with this bond investing video, which teaches you bond investing basics, as well as more advanced topics every bond investor should know.


Our founder, Steve Shaw, made this presentation via webinar to AAII Chicago on March 21, 2020.  Due to the COVID-19 crisis, he could not present in person, so the webinar was the next best thing.  We recorded the webinar and posted it on YouTube, where there is a full table of contents, as shown below.  If you watch the video on YouTube, please give us a 'like,' share the video on your social media accounts, and subscribe to the BondSavvy YouTube channel.


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How Do Bonds Work Table of Contents (times are clickable when viewing on YouTube):


0:00 Introduction
1:04 Bond investing joke
1:34 How to use chat in Zoom tool
1:58 Bonds are on sale and stock dividends are not safe
3:39 How bonds have been impacted by COVID-19
9:31 Sample corporate bond returns
12:38 Bond webinar agenda
15:42 How bond investing conventional wisdom is wrong
18:08Three things to know for any investment
19:05 Why investors can’t compare relative value of bond funds
21:03 Turnover of largest bond funds
26:26 How bonds are quoted relative to par value
30:26 Individual bonds vs. bond funds
39:07 Corporate bonds vs. stocks
45:48 Corporate bonds vs. bonds funds, muni bonds, and stocks
51:10 Bed Bath stock vs. Bed Bath bonds
52:22 Our Bed Bath bond investment rationale
56:42 Corporate Bonds 101 Introduction
57:02 Example of Kroger corporate bond
1:02:06 Example of corporate bond bid/offer quote
1:07:32 Current yield vs. yield to maturity
1:15:39 How bond investing has changed over 25 years
1:17:14 Introduction to online bond quotes
1:23:10 Shortcomings of bond ratings
1:32:15 Flawed methodologies of bond rating agencies
1:37:38 Which bonds are sensitive to interest rates and why?
1:48:25 How to read the Wall Street Journal bond tables – investment grade bonds
1:49:44 Wall Street Journal high yield corporate bond tables
1:50:04 Bond investment analysis – introduction
1:50:26 Leverage ratio vs. interest coverage ratio
1:52:36 Corporate bond sweat meter
2:00:21 How we compare risk and return for corporate bonds
2:01:54 Considerations other than default risk
2:02:03 Interest rate risk
2:03:45 How some bonds aren’t impacted by market interest rates
2:06:44 Introduction to active bond investing
2:06:56 How bond prices have ceilings
2:08:50 How bond prices have fallen during COVID-19 crisis
2:10:05 Why you should not build bond ladders
2:11:22 Bond ladders vs. active investing
2:14:28 How an acquisition impacts a bond
2:18:48 What active investing is and is not
2:19:38 Our ‘Bond Investing Commandments’
2:20:53 Are you a student of investing?
2:22:01 Why we founded BondSavvy
2:22:42 BondSavvy subscription offer
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