(BQ) Part 2 book "Guide to investment strategy" has contents: Bonds, debt and credit; hedge funds - try to keep it simple, private equity - information-based returns; real estate. | 8 Bonds, debt and credit A nalysis of modern bonds can quickly become off-puttingly complicated. A useful starting point is an elementary review written by John Maynard Keynes in 1925 of a study comparing long-term returns from equities with those from bonds in the United States between 1866 and 1922. The study showed a substantial outperformance of equities over bonds in periods of both deflation and inflation. Keynes found this counterintuitive, his expectation being that a period of deflation would be better for bonds than equities. He suggested a number of reasons for the inferior performance of bonds: The asymmetrical threat of changes in the general price level. While bonds can be eroded by inflation without limit, the scope for the general level of prices to fall (which benefits bond holders, so long as bond issuers have the ability to repay these higher real values), is in practice more constrained. Although a bond may default, no bond ever pays more than the stipulated rate of interest. Company management always sides with equity investors rather than with bond holders and, “in particular, the management will avail themselves of their rights to repay bonds at dates most advantageous to the shareholders and most disadvantageous to the bondholders”. Retained earnings provide an element of compound growth, beyond the dividend yield that accrues to the benefit of the stockholder (while making existing obligations to creditors more secure). Such reasoning, supported by now much more extensive data, underlies the message of a number of advisers and academics that the natural habitat for genuinely long-term investors is the equity market. Or, as one notably successful equity investor expressed it, the natural role for the long-term investor is to be “the proprietor”. Nevertheless, almost all investors do, and indeed should, seek diversification away from equity risk. In Part 1 this was argued from the perspective of investing in government bonds. This chapter provides
