From the desk of Tom Bruni @brunicharting
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Telecom Threatening A Structural Breakdown
When I read about the Telecom sector or speak with colleagues about it, I find many people often think of it as a collection of companies with strong balance sheets, great cash flows, and shareholder friendly actions like juicy dividends and share buybacks. While that may be true in many cases, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the sector can be utilized as a bond proxy to boost a portfolio’s yield. As we saw in recent years with sectors exposed to high-yield, and MLPs, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In addition to that, simple math shows that Telecom hasn’t been correlated with bonds (TLT) at all over the past ten years, with the correlation being 0.29, 0.19, and 0.08 over the past one year, three years, and ten years, respectively.
If you had adopted the above philosophy, stuck this sector in your portfolio and hoped for the best, you’ve seen that [Read more…]