I liked the bit about "market gives and takes, inflation only takes."
He mentions the usual thing about bond yields going down when interest rates go down, making bonds pretty useless at the moment, where "the moment" is not well defined. I've heard this before but was never totally clear on it, so this seems as good a time as any to ask. I was thinking I should put some more stuff in a less volatile place and the traditional answer is bonds, right?
If I look at
https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/profile/performance/vbtlx, for 1, 3, 5, 10 year yields it has 4.65%, 5.50%, 4.00%, 3.70%. That seems pretty reasonable to me, basically at or sightly above inflation. If I look at the graph it's pretty much up and to the right without the big drops that something like VTSAX has. But looking closer, there's a flat spot from around 2016 to 2019, and then maybe another one starting in 2020, but maybe too early to tell.
So from the yield percents, it seems like bonds are no better or worse than they ever were, which is to say, serve their main purpose of not going down, and the secondary one of going up more or less enough to offset inflation. But from the graph, there's that flat spot where I assume they are not being any better than cash. Is that what people refer to when they say "nowadays" bonds aren't serving their purpose?
And even if they're not, the real question is "what else then?" If there's nothing else, then bonds are still the answer to the cash-esque safety blanket, right?