Bonds help add diversity to your portfolio and control risk. But they can be complicated. Zero-coupon bonds are cheaper to invest in than conventional bonds but have some unique characteristics that ...

Exhibit 1 shows April returns for a sample of Morningstar analyst-rated ETFs that serve as proxies for major asset classes. Investors in a blended global portfolio earned a 1.01% return last month, as ...

Bonds can help diversify your portfolio, but they are not risk-free. Find out what a bond is, how bonds work and how they may work for you. Bonds are IOUs issued by corporations, federal, state and ...

When professional investors discuss the credit market, a term that often arises is duration, which is used to measure the sensitivity of a bond’s trading price to changes in interest rates ...

A municipal bond’s embedded call option allows the issuer of the bond to “call” (i.e., pay back) the debt at a date prior to the bond’s final maturity, which allows the issuer to reduce the cost of ...

Over the long run, stocks tend to perform much better than bonds. Still, it's good to understand bonds, and they can add some balance to a portfolio. Bonds are essentially long-term loans. If a ...