FHY News and Press, First Trust Strategic High Income Fund II of Beneficial Interest From 09/25/19

By Gershon Distenfeld Transcript: Risk assets, be it high-yield bonds, equity markets worldwide, are not pricing in all that much bad news. The rates markets worldwide are. One of them is wrong. I see time and time again that people say we're later in the cycle, I don't want to ow...

As the drums of the U.S.-China trade war beat louder, one has to keep in the back of one's mind where the point of no return is. It is probably not a specific "point," but a gray area that is a moving target, depending on how badly the U.S. and other global economies get hurt. For example, hur...

Originally published August 5, 2019 By Edward Altman What Is a Benign Credit Cycle?* By my definition, benign credit cycles are periods when most if not all four aspects of the market are incentivizing major growth in the supply and demand for credit. That means three or more of the ...

By Seth Meyer, CFA In a period of falling interest rates, yield is dear, and high yield therefore remains an attractive asset class. However, with increased interest rate volatility and uncertainty around economic growth, Portfolio Manager Seth Meyer says a cautious approach and a focus o...

The U.S. Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. Kim Parlee speaks with Greg Kocik, Managing Director at TD Asset Management, about how to build a high-yield portfolio in an era of low interest Read more ...

Low and likely falling interest rates coupled with tight credit spreads are limiting the bond market's upside and leaving investors searching for alternative sources of yield. While investors often have specific allocations to corporate bonds and high yield debt, not all portfolios include ded...

"They say ignorance is bliss....they're wrong " - Franz Kafka If someone had told me during my long career on Wall Street that one day there would be negative yielding bonds I would have thought that person "Nuts!" It made no empirical sense then, and it makes no empirical sense now. Yet, ...

Make no mistake in your thinking. The nations of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the rest of the European Union, along with Switzerland, and Japan, are "forcing" the Fed into a corner without any real escape. To begin with, the Fed, by its charter, is an "Independent Entity" created by t...

To many onlookers, since the great financial crisis, the world of fixed income securities has become an alien landscape. Yields on government bonds have fallen steadily across all developed markets. As the chart below reveals, there is now a record US$13trln+ of negative-yielding fixed income ...

The two US dollar proxies followed regularly are the Invesco DB USD Bullish ETF (UUP) and the DXY. The UUP is a tradeable ETF, but it generates a K-1, therefore I stopped buying it for clients. Both the DXY and the UUP have identical currency weightings: Euro: 58% Yen: 14% ...