Barbell Investment Strategy

Barbell Investment Strategy: you lift a lot of weights, then just go around making people give you money for retirement. It's also a legit strategy for investing in bonds.

You know how a barbell looks? Big heavy weights on either end with just a bar in the middle. That's the outline of the strategy.

First a bit about bonds. Bonds come with durations, basically representing how long they continue to pay out. So you might have a 2-year bond or a 10-year bond or 30-year bond, etc. You can roughly categorize these durations as short (less than 5 years), intermediate (in the 5-to-10-year range) or long (more than 10 years).

In a barbell strategy, you buy short duration and long duration bonds, but stay away from intermediate-term ones. The benefit of long-term bonds is that the interest rate is higher. Since it's a bigger risk waiting all that time, you get paid a higher rate in order to wait. Short-term bonds have a low payout, but they carry the least risk. You have some visibility over the near term, so the chances are much lower that something unexpected will happen and trigger a default.

The theory behind the barbell strategy is that intermediate bonds carry the worst of both worlds. The durations are too long for any real visibility, but the rates are below what you'd get for longer-term bonds. By mixing the short and long terms in your portfolio, you balance the risk/reward equation, the theory says, so there's no need to mess with the intermediate stuff.