Personal Finance and Investing

progree

(11,906 posts)

33. An example of the sad bond market: Vanguard Intermediate Term Treasury fund only 1.08%/yr since 1/2015

Reply to littlemissmartypants (Original post)

Thu Apr 10, 2025, 06:03 PM

Apr 10

Last edited Fri Apr 11, 2025, 01:22 AM - Edit history (1)

and volatile. A good graph of that volatility, e.g. Vanguard IntermediateTerm Treasury Admiral VFIUX
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/vfiux/performance

plus a table of total annual returns by year. Negative numbers are in parenthesis ( )
2015 1.61%
2016 1.29%
2017 1.67%
2018 1.10%
2019 6.39%
2020 8.31%
2021 (2.19%)
2022 (10.34%)
2023 4.18%
2024 1.48%
YTD 2.78%

which shows some of the volatility and the piss-poor returns.
Since the beginning of 2015, its total return is cumulatively only 11.61%
(A $10,000 investment grew only to $11,161 in those 10.25 years)
which comes to an average annualized total return of only (1.1161^(1/10.25) -1)*100% = 1.077%/yr

And as far as purchasing power, it is way underwater:
CPI: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUSR0000SA0
1/2015: 234.747
3/2025: 319.615
So, consumer costs rose 36.15% during that period.
The purchasing power of the $10,000 bond portfolio is now only $8,197 (=234.747/319.615 * $11,161), an 18.03% decrease.

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An example of the sad bond market: Vanguard Intermediate Term Treasury fund only 1.08%/yr since 1/2015 progree Apr 10 #33

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