TLT has been a poor investment over the last six years, with negative compounding, and its role as a portfolio hedge is now questioned.

If you were an investor in TLT, which is a very popular longdated treasury bond ETF out of EyesShares, you compounded at almost 8% a year positive through the 2010s. It was a very good money-making investment.

In the 2020s, because real rates have exploded from being negative to being very positive, your kager, your compound annual growth rate over this decade so far has been negative 4.4%.

So, this went from being a massive money-making trade being long the long end of the curve to being just very destructive to portfolio returns. Um, a kagger of 7.8% a year on a portfolio of long-term treasuries, which effectively from a credit perspective are risk-free. the risk that you're taking is duration risk because the interest rates fluctuate.

But like to be able to earn 8% a year from 2010 through 2019 led to a lot of allocators including TLT or something like it as as sort of a permanent part of their um asset allocation.

That piece of the puzzle, that piece of the allocation in the last 6 years has been compounding at -4.4%. A lot of people thought TLT should always be included in allocations because when the market's getting killed or the economyy's in big trouble, that should work really well to the upside as a hedge.

your hedge your hedge for an overall portfolio should lose money when times are good and it and it's worked but I think a lot of people are now looking at that and saying maybe that's not the exact hedge that I want going forward.

And look, that that trade even worked in 2020 when everything was falling apart in the pandemic. TLT was rallying. It was the anchor for a lot of portfolios. It just has been destructive since.

We've just seen TLT compound at negative4% over the last six years. That's real risk.