EVN News and Press, Eaton Vance Municipal Income Trust From 07/30/19

Municipal bonds have seen record flows in 2019. Martin talks to head of BlackRock's municipal strategy about some of the reasons why. Martin: Sean, first set the stage for us. Munis have been on a tear this year. What's behind it? Sean: I would say the most obvious driver has been a ...

Introduction Over the past few months, most of you have noticed our increased activity in closed-end funds as the inflow of volatility finally shook them up and created various arbitrage and directional opportunities for active traders like us. Currently, we are cautious when we choose o...

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By Patricia Healy, CFA The positive trend of upgrades to downgrades continues. S&P reported on May 8th that upgrades outpaced downgrades by 2.39 to 1 in Q1 2019, which compares to 2.09 to 1 for all of 2018. In our monitoring of rating agencies' actions, this trend appears to have conti...

By Cooper J Howard When you buy a municipal bond, you're making a loan to a state or local government, for which it promises to pay you back an amount at some date in the future - potentially as long as 30 years in the future. How do you know if the municipality will be able to make good...

Introduction Over the past few months, most of you have noticed our increased activity in closed-end funds as the inflow of volatility finally shook them up and created various arbitrage and directional opportunities for active traders like us. Currently, we are cautious when we choose o...

Read more ...

By John R. Mousseau, CFA The muni bond market has been on a tear so far this year. Not only have yields dropped, but they have dropped relative to US Treasuries across the board. The chart below shows where we are now and where we were at the start of the year. The big squeeze has been...

The Benchmark On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve informed investors that it will keep interest rates unchanged. Municipal bonds did not seem very interested in the news, and we saw another calm week with low volatility. The main index, iShares National Muni Bond ETF ( MUB ), increased its p...

By Cooper J Howard The municipal bond market is off to its hottest start in five years, led by the lower-rated segments of the muni market. It may be tempting to chase returns, but we suggest that investors instead take a cautious approach and focus on higher-rated issuers during the secon...