As much as I want to try and squeeze more juice out of my fixed income portion of my AA, I buy into the philosophy that it is basically there to minimize volatility in my over over portfolio, especially once I pull the rip cord and am living off only my investments. While I am trying to minimize being a market timer, I do think some subtle tinkering from time to time could be in order. Perhaps it doesn't move the needle much in the long run, but it makes me feel alive and active! Soooo... we have been riding a 37 yr old bond bull and are now in an environment where I would wager to guess most experts believe we are in position to see a longer trend of subtle interest rate increases. Sure, a recession stops the music, but I would guess most of us would look at our crystal ball and say the trend line is pointing up vs down for the foreseeable future as it relates to interest rates. If you buy into my assumptions and are a total return investor as opposed to a dividend/yield investor and look at your fixed AA to steady the ship with your equity portion, should we not be considering pushing a significant part of our fixed AA in money markets? Approaching just under a 2% yield and following the movement of the Fed, does this not make more sense to consider? I am currently holding a significant portion of my fixed allocation in intermediate funds/ETFs and while the net return may be slightly positive, it doesn't feel right with interest rate trends. While some of the Fed's moves appears to be baked in and the last few months have been holding somewhat steady on pricing, I have to believe the continued trend line will further put pressure on pricing. Alternatively, I don't see any real advantage to short term bonds. If you are a yield investor, I get how you may put your blinders on fund pricing and focus on the yield/dividend, but total return folks, what am I missing here? It seems like if we have a recession and you believe things may go in the $hitter for a while, you could easily jump back to bonds. Market timing? Perhaps, but not sure we can rely on the last 37 yrs of bond trends to guide us for the next 30, especially if you are in or starting retirement. Thoughts?