As we embark on the second half of 2023, we find a market in conflict. Despite the continued (relative) hawkishness by the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its members, most risk assets have continued to perform well.
For fixed income markets, volatility remains the recurring theme across fixed income markets. We have discussed this for more than a year, and we are once again left to contemplate volatility around the market direction narrative versus realized volatility in fixed income markets.
For each of the first three quarters of 2022, we spent the opening paragraph of this piece finding new and interesting ways to describe just how bad fixed income performance was, across all sectors and tenors. Yet despite capping one of the worst years for fixed income historically, 4Q22 managed to provide positive total and excess returns.
Three quarters of 2022 are in the books, and it is certainly three quarters fixed income investors would all like to forget. As has become our custom, we present a Market Scorecard to document what has occurred across fixed income markets. The numbers are breathtakingly bad and putting them (once again) in a historical context, the bond vigilantes have delivered on the worst three quarter stretch (for some sectors) ever. The broad corporate market, for example, has seen its worst three quarters in succession since inception of modern corporate indices. The same can be said for the broad US Treasury market. At this point, however, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We open another quarterly commentary with a discussion of just how bad the quarter was for fixed income markets. At the same time, however, a host of metrics suggest that many fixed income valuations are as attractive as they have been in several years. While we think caution and patience are the operative words in the spread sectors, we note some extreme dollar price drops given the movement in both rates and risk premia over the course of 2022.
