Market Commentaries
Perspective for Advisors: Muni Duration & Sharpe Ratio Analysis
April 2021Municipal bonds are known for their credit preservation characteristics (and certainly have proved their worth during today’s crisis), but another less known attribute of the asset class is their ability to mitigate duration.1 Duration is one of the pr …
2021 Municipal Outlook and Year-end Review
January 2021Apparent Risk in Municipal Bond Land In December 2019 we released Unapparent Risk in Municipal Bond Land which recapped a solid year of performance and warned investors of the underlying risks within the municipal market. We did not expect those risks …
Perspective for Advisors: Opportunity in Taxable Municipal Bonds
December 2020Taxable municipal bonds (taxable at the federal – and oftentimes state – income level) have historically lacked investors’ attention due to limited supply and presence in a market dominated by investors seeking non-taxable income. Supply has skyrockete …
Update: COVID-19 and its Impact on Municipal Credit (Part III)
September 2020September 28, 2020 In Part III of our municipal credit commentary pertaining to the health and economic crisis brought on by COVID-19 we overview the most recent data available pertaining to state revenue surveys and data from municipalities within the …
Market Review – Summer 2020
July 2020Please find below our portfolio management team’s Summer 2020 Municipal Market Review. This provides an overview of current market conditions and information about municipal strategies. If you would like additional information about our outlook, proc …
Perspective for Advisors: Separately Managed Accounts Prove Their Worth
May 2020In March 2020, the COVID-19 crisis caused dislocations across world financial markets. The municipal market was not sheltered from this chaos. At the end of February, tax-free yields were sub-1% out to 11-year maturities. In mid-March, municipal bond p …
Unique Economic Challenges of COVID-19: The Evolving Impact on Municipal Credit, Part II
April 2020The effects of COVID-19 on the nation are far different than prior natural disasters in the recent history of the United States and continue to evolve with each day. We are still learning and reacting. The national impact is significant as evidenced by …
Keeping Calm and Carrying On
April 2020I hope you and your families are well. I hope everyone is safe. The current state of affairs all of us face is fluid, so I want to provide you with periodic updates. Thankfully to date, the entire Bernardi Securities team remains healthy, safe, and eng …
COVID-19 and its Impact on Municipal Credit (Part I)
March 2020We would be remiss to not wish each of our readers and clients safety and peace of mind during these most trying times. Following Governor Pritzker’s “stay-at-home” order, we want to let you know our firm will remain open via remote access operations a …
Support and Guidance for our Clients, Bernardi Team Members and Colleagues
March 2020Good afternoon everyone. We are all experiencing unprecedented events and uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 health threat. I am writing to provide a brief summary of actions we undertook last week to ensure our firm remains fully operational to s …
Finding Relative Value in the Municipal Market
March 2020Contagion risk is gripping society and financial markets alike. Year-to-date the S&P 500 is down nearly 15% while oil dropped 25% yesterday alone. Treasury bond yields have dropped precipitously and at one point every rung of the Treasury yield cur …
Unapparent Risk in Municipal Bond Land
December 20192019 municipal bond market performance has been stellar as its safe-haven status persisted in a year packed with monetary policy easing from global central banks. The Bloomberg Barclays long-term tax-exempt index is up 7.54% YTD.[1] While 4Q informatio …
RE: Wall Street Journal’s “Your Stock Trades Go Free but Your Cash Is in Chains”
October 2019Jason Zweig’s October 4th article underscores that transactions costs should not be the only metric investors use to evaluate investment platforms. Additionally – and as importantly – they need to consider opportunity costs, the portfolio management pr …
Bond Portfolio Strategy in a Booming Market
September 2019“Negative nominal interest rates are contradictory in an expectations-driven liquidity trap, unless they are able to eliminate deflationary expectations altogether…This paper has shown that negative interest rates are likely to make things worse in an …
Stranger Things & Global Central Banks
August 2019The hit Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things takes place in the fictional 1980’s town of Hawkins, Indiana. The show follows a group of middle school kids fending off other-dimensional monsters and Russian conspiracy plots. The threats are significant, …