Bond buyers left bemoaning 13% returns after oil's wild year

Washington

LAST year, the biggest winners in the high-yield bond market were investors who eked out any positive gains. This year, even returns of 15 per cent aren't enough to make the top rank.

Blame commodities. Even investors who notched double-digit returns wound up trailing their benchmarks because they failed to take a chance on enough beaten-up energy and mining company bonds at the February bottom. Major US junk-bond indexes, from Bloomberg Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch were up 16.9 per cent and 17 per cent this year as of last week, respectively, while the median high-yield fund with more than US$1 billion of assets returned 13.4 per cent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.