No. of Recommendations: 2
If you want higher returns, buy stock in a good company (or better, a quality ETF), rather than a bond issued by a bad company. High yield bond funds are nothing but a collection of bad bonds. Avoid.
I agree in general--it's why I buy preferred stocks and hold until called, rather than...trading...them. But I tend to disagree regarding "high yield bond funds." I've long used Vanguard's high yield bond fund--their junk bond fund--to good effect as a place to park medium-term cash when I'm out of the market. Individual junk bonds are a bad risk, certainly. But a well-run fund, like Vanguard, Fidelity, some others, spreads the likelihood of failure of one or another individual--or even a few--holdings across the entire inventory of holdings, so that those one or a few failures don't materially hurt the fund or an investor in the fund.
Certainly the fund's NAV varies, and it gets hurt--some--by an individual or a few failures, but the accumulation of dividends the fund pays while I'm holding it more than makes up for any NAV movement down between the time I buy the fund to park cash and when I sell the fund to reinvest the cash.
Of course, others' mileage may vary.
Eric Hines
