With all the excitement in the equity market these days – Solid Q2 earnings! Silly stocks! AI mania! – it’s easy for bonds to get lost in the shuffle. The wild interest rate swings in the opening years of this decade have given way to a long period of elevated but stable yields, which has important implications for how we design bond portfolios.

The Fed, investors, and corporate America are holding their breath — waiting to see if AI can keep the economy from slipping.

Enter “silly stocks”. The past several weeks have featured meteoric rises in the stock prices of many companies with little to no hope of developing a sustained business model but are, for whatever reason, attractive to investors looking for a laugh or a thrill. To take one example, OpenDoor, a non-profitable online home purchase company, saw its stock increase by as much as 500% before it began to lose some air. More broadly, Goldman Sachs Research has identified a noticeable uptick in speculative investor behavior, eclipsed only by the bubbles that formed in the late 1990s and briefly in 2021.