How to Build a Government Bond Portfolio
Rédaction Financial World News · Explication pédagogique · Comment nous sourçons les rendements
Pick a currency of liabilities, a duration budget, nominal vs linker mix, then implement with bonds, ladders or funds.
Le briefing complet de ce guide est en anglais. Le titre, le résumé et la navigation sont dans votre langue pour que vous puissiez décider de poursuivre la lecture.
How to Build a Government Bond Portfolio — the mechanics
Start from when you need the money, not from which country yields 20bp more this morning. Then use our comparator and watchlist (free account) to track the ISINs you actually own or want.
Order of operations: spending currency, date you need the money (duration budget), inflation-linked versus nominal, then implementation (bonds, ladder, ETF). Yield shopping is last, not first.
A ladder of 4–8 individual government bonds in your currency, or one cheap government-bond fund, beats a collage of 12 countries you cannot explain.
Use the comparator to line up YTM, duration and currency. Save ISINs only after that grid is filled — that is what the optional watchlist is for, not the other way around.
Official sources (Comparisons)
Primary statistics and prospectuses for Comparisons are published by the issuer, not by this newsroom. The labelled links at the end of this page go to those official sites (DMO, TreasuryDirect, Finanzagentur, MEF, AFT, SNB or ECB as relevant).
Our live board is a teaching overlay: dated prints, named sources, estimated ISIN lines. It is not a replacement for the issuer’s calendar.
Points essentiels
- Order of operations: spending currency, date you need the money (duration budget), inflation-linked versus nominal, then implementation (bonds, ladder, ETF).
- Prices and yields change. When this site quotes them, it dates them on the live board.
- Credit of a G7 government in its own currency is not the same as a stable screen price, and not the same as a bank deposit.
FAQ
- How many bonds do I need?
- A ladder of 4–8 individual bonds, or one or two government-bond funds, is enough for most individuals. Diversifying across 40 sovereigns is rarely the constraint — currency and duration are.