Ah, I guess I see what you mean. It is not easy to find month-to-month historical YTM data to do that evaluation. But I happen to have been socking away funds monthly in AGG (BND equivalent) since 2018 (along with some occasional rebalancing in and out), and just ran an XIRR on those transactions, and indeed its XIRR is +4.72%. Which kind of explains why I haven't felt the horror that others express here about such funds — when I look at overall portfolio performance it seems perfectly fine and pretty much what I expected.You did the exact error that pointed out people do, taking snapshot of specific start/end points, instead of doing rolling returns with many start/end points. Do this year over year, month over month, between 2015 to 2025, at least 10 years to get a decent idea of where normal distributions fall and then see how many of those were outliers. There would be 100s of iterations simulating experience of different investors. That should give you an idea that the "promise" was kept or not. I would wager that it did 90 out of 100 such scenarios, and the 10 that failed were not fatal errors.
As best as I can ascertain, the YTM of BND's portfolio in July 2019 was 2.49%. In July 2025, 6 years later, it had delivered a total return of 0.66% per year. That seems like a notable divergence. That said, that total return is calculated with dividends reinvested along the way, which maybe is not the right setting of that parameter to evaluate whether it kept its "promise"?
Statistics: Posted by ahc19081 — Tue Dec 09, 2025 1:58 am — Replies 92 — Views 6590