Saturday, March 14, 2009

Why I Went to Cash for Our Clients on Oct. 6th, 2008

One of the positions that we owned at the time was the iShares Barclays 1 -3 year Credit Bond (ticker symbol CSJ.) Ordinarily, in a normal market situation, this investment should rarely move more than 0 to 1% in a day. On October 1st and 2nd of 2008, it was moving about 3% on those days. This is a 1 - 3 year Credit Bond that has short term maturities. Typically, short term maturity bonds have a more stable range of prices than longer bonds. When I saw this short term maturity investment moving about 3 times its normal range, then that is when we made the decision to get out first thing Monday morning on October the 6th, 2008.

I didn't want to try and figure out why it was doing this. There were obviously some underlying issues going on that were unknown at the time. When you factor in the money market and commercial paper scare, plus this short term maturities fluctuation, then that was cause for alarm. We made the move to cash, which as you now know, proved to be a good one.

Now you know.

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