ZF News and Press, Virtus Total Return Fund Inc. From 08/08/21

Up until the last decade, negative interest rates were the stuff of abstract theory. Today, the volume of fixed-income securities trading with yields below zero runs to $16.5 trillion, having grown steadily over the past two months with the renewed rally in global bond prices. Expecta...

There are many common myths about the market taken as truth by most investors. Studies show just how poorly investors really understand how the market works. It's time for investors to gain a better understanding of what drives them and the market. For further details see: ...

We've been monitoring ZTR over the last year or so since the fund dropped to a deep discount. Now the fund is back in the premium territory after hitting a nearly 15% discount in October 2020. The fund's yield remains near 10% and I believe that is driving investors to pick up thi...

If you are looking for a snapshot as to why there is so much to this “growth scare” and rising deflationary potential (record stocks, though), outside recent labor market data you’d be hard-pressed to do better than US trade statistics. We can see already the disc...

The past week has been a story of stagflation infecting the US economy while the stock market grimaces as the Fed expresses the need to start a gradual pullout from economic stimulus much sooner or face a rapid pullout a little later. Rapid inflation pounds away at the producer side i...

Initial claims for regular state unemployment insurance totaled 385,000 for the week ending July 31, a drop of 14,000 from the previous week’s revised tally of 399,000. The number of ongoing claims for state unemployment programs totaled 3.259 million for the week ending July 1...

The ISM’s Non-manufacturing PMI rose sharply in July 2021, four big points, up to 64.1 and handily beating estimates. This was in opposition to the slowdown trend which Manufacturing ISM displayed only too well two days ago. Though, the ADP release corroborates the sense of another...

GMI’s 10-year Sharpe ratio (SR) edged up for a fifth straight month to 0.86, the highest since January 2020, based on a rolling ten-year window via monthly data. Profiling GMI through a drawdown lens also reflects an extended stretch of low risk. GMI is useful as a baseline...

The projected risk premium for the Global Market held steady in July at an annualized 6.0%, unchanged from the previous month. Despite the recent bounce, GMI’s trailing 10-year performance remains well below the previous 8%-plus peak. No one really knows what risk premia wi...

A marked fall in business optimism in July hints that companies could become reticent to expand capacity while the pandemic continues to hit supply chains. Output growth continued to run behind the growth of new orders for a fifth straight month, meaning backlogs of work rose sharply ...