The Bond Bears Growled In November

The S&P 500 gained 3.7 percent in November as investors piled into equity funds. Another way of looking at that scenario is that November was unkind to bonds and fixed income exchange traded funds. In fact, data suggest short sellers eagerly targeted bond funds last month.

Two bond ETFs remain among this year's top 10 asset-gathering ETFs, but that's well below the peak seen earlier this year when as many as five or six of the 10 best asset-gathering ETFs were bond funds.

“November has been a unanimously tough month for fixed income investors as the growing consensus around a US interest rate hike and the creeping specter of inflation has sent global benchmark rates spiking to the highest levels in over a year. Every major asset class, save for Indian rupee denominated bonds and high yield sterling bonds, posted negative total returns for the month,” said Markit in a recent note.

Through the first half of 2016, about $40 billion flowed into bond ETFs, with approximately half of that total flowing into iShares products, in the third annual version of “Institutional Investors Embrace Bond ETFs,” according to recent study by BlackRock and Greenwich Associates.

With bond traders believing that a rate hike by the Federal Reserve later this month is a sure thing, investors departed some previously beloved Treasury ETFs in November. For example, the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF TLT lost $274.3 million assets last month while the iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF IEF bled nearly $130 million.

The Direxion Daily 20+ Year Treasury 3X Bear Shares TMF recently saw increased volume. For the five days ended December 1, TMF's volume was nearly 23 percent above its trailing 20-day average. TMF attempts to deliver triple the daily inverse returns of the ICE U.S. Treasury 20+ Year Bond Index.

With intensifying rate hike speculation, it's not surprising that short sellers are eagerly targeting junk bond ETFs, such as the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF HYG and the SPDR Bloomberg Barclays High Yield Bond ETF JNK.

HYG and JNK are the two largest junk bond ETFs trading in the US.

“High yield bonds are by far and away the most in demand from short sellers as the two largest US listed funds that invest in the asset class, the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond Fund and the Spdr Bloomberg Barclays High Yield Bond ETF make up half the aggregate bond ETF borrow with $2.9bn and $1.3bn of these funds now out on loan respectively. The recent volatility hasn’t spurred much additional borrow demand for these funds however as both their value on loan have been relatively flat over the last month,” adds Markit.