Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: How to Buy Treasuries

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

On today's show, we are joined by Alex Morris, Co-Founder and CIO of F/m Investments and the US Benchmark Series to discuss yield volatility, why it's so hard to buy single treasuries, the 2023 banking crisis, and much more!   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...  Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense  Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor  Like us on Facebook  And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.      (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by U.S. Benchmark Series. Go to U.S. Treasuryetf.com to learn more about how you can buy straight treasuries, three-month T-bill, six-month T-bill, 12-month T-bill, two-year treasury note, 10-year treasury note. It's very simple. It's as simple as it sounds, right, Michael? ETF's of Treasuries. That's U.S. Treasuryetf.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing.

Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Rit Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. On today's show, we're talking Treasuries.

Michael, a month ago, two months ago, I don't know. Everything seems to me like it's either five years ago or three weeks ago. What? I had a question. Treasuries. Y.S or IES? IES. It goes both ways.

It's fair ground. Yeah, we looked this up before. There's no one answer. I think I'm an IES too. I feel like if you use YS, you're from either Australia or New Zealand or Great Britain. You and I were walking in Miami, however long ago it was. And we saw a bunch of booths for different fund providers, ETFs, that sort of thing. And one of them was for the U.S. benchmark series. And they had it very

plainly written, you can buy treasuries from us, straight treasuries, a three-month T-bill, the six-month T-bill, a 12-month T-bill, two-year treasury note, and 10-year treasury note. And you and I both said, why did no one do this before? This makes no sense, why you can buy just the direct, on the run, whatever they call it, and get that exact exposure. And no one had ever done this before. They launched it at the perfect time when you finally had some yields, and they brought in a bunch of money. And it's just one of those things that timing is perfect, right place, right time, but also right product. I don't think we need to step too much on this conversation. It's exactly as it sounds. Please enjoy our conversation

with Alex Morris from U.S. Benchmark Series. We're joined today by Alex Morris. Alex is the chief investment officer at Defractive Managers Group. Alex, thank you for coming on today. Jens, it was pleasure to be here. All right. So it is Monday, March 13th, 2003. There was big, big news over the weekend that Silicon Valley Bank went under, signature bank as well. And there's a lot to unpack here. And then as a spillover effect, a lot of the gigantic banks are getting killed. So you would say to yourself, why is Schwab down 35% of the last three sessions? What does that possibly have to do with Silicon Valley Bank going under. And I think one of the things that investors are started to get worried about is the

fact that with depositors in the cash accounts earning so little on their cash, why would people not just move the money into treasury bills? Why literally would you give up 400 basis points or whatever it is? It doesn't make any sense at all. So anyway, you, Alex, run an ETF that actually owns the treasuries at targeted maturities. Why don't you talk to us about what I just mentioned and how you solve that problem? We do just that. We were trying to answer the same problem. If we come into early part of 2022, we back this up pre-banking crisis of 2023. We saw the need to get into treasuries broadly for our clients, whether they be institutions or individual investors. And buying a treasury sounds so easy. We hear it mentioned all the news media all the time.

You just buy treasuries until you actually try to do it. It turns out it's a little more complicated than you think. If you go to Schwab or Fidelity and you type in two-year treasury, you're going to get a screen of 50 different things. Everything from the number you saw in coded form, right, because it's going to be in price, not in yield, on CNBC, the on-the-run two-year treasury, through all of the old two-year treasuries that are aging out,

through some 30-year treasury that's 28 years old, and all stages in between. It's really complicated. So we built out something that does what we otherwise do for institutional clients, which is risk management. And generally, that means staying in the on-the-run Treasury. That's the thing the Treasury most recently issued. It's the most liquid security.

The on-the-run U.S. 10-year, for example, is what prices everything from your mortgage to to your car loan to the price of margin in a bank account or in a brokerage account. It's just so ubiquitous. And the problem is it's just hard to do. Believe it or not, the government offers a website for you to do this, treasury direct. gov. You can go there. Built in 1986.

That's right. Exactly. And you can go buy an I-series bond. You can try to buy this. luck trying to sell it. Good luck trying to understand the price. It has to work. That website crashes a bunch. So we did the thing that we thought would be easy. Give investors access to the same rates tool set that we as institutional investors had, particularly when cash paid them nothing. And money markets were threatening to start charging for being in them.

You have vehicles for, it looks like three month, six month, 12 month, two year and 10 year, correct? Yep, today. That's true. Okay. So walk us through the process of how this works, how your investment process works. You say you buy it on the run, these are effectively rolled over like on a monthly basis. Is that how it works? Yeah, so the two year and the one year rolled on a monthly basis, the 10 years rolled every quarter, so those are issued quarterly. The 90 day, the six months, those are issued much more frequently throughout the year, oftentimes once a week, sometimes twice a week. So we'll work looking at the curve to make sure we're not going to make an obviously costful trade. The goal is to get you exposure to the 90 day. And we figure

your investors are less worried if it's 90 days or 87 days or 85 days. They don't need to overpay to go back up the curve five days. And from track record of it, we've done a fairly decent job of managing that exposure risk without roll cost. Alex, I say it's better to be lucky than good. You guys started this at an insanely fortuitous time. If you started this four years ago. You'd be probably sitting here four years later with $37,000 in assets. Nobody cared about holding treasury, certainly not at the short end. But all of a sudden, we're in a different world where a treasury was actually quite attractive. When I learned about your product, I thought to myself, A, that's so innovative, but B, how come nobody's ever done that before?

It seems so obvious. What was your reaction when you had this idea and then went to see, surely somebody must have done this already? So we had the same thought. So when Pete Baden, one of my colleagues, rang up and we started, you know, fleshing out this idea. The first answer was, obviously this exists, just look a little harder. And after a few days of looking, none of us could find it. So we asked some other folks and no one could find it. We were also afraid early on, and maybe not afraid as a word, worried that we wouldn't be allowed to do it, the notion of an actual single thing in an ETF. And then that other bit of good luck came, the single security ETFs, single stock ETF started to come out. And they're right, really,

neither single nor stocks, for that matter, really just baskets of exchange-traded swaps. But that really got the market pumped up about this idea that you could do this. And then we really started pulling into it. And it turns out the SEC wasn't the one who would worry about us concentrating in a single issuer. It was the IRS. They don't want you to put a stock inside of an ETF and never pay short-term capital gains on it.

So they are the ones who say you have to own five things, basically. Nothing more than 24.9 percent. And then want something else to round out the rest. So once we realize that lots of treasury providers, you know, lots of treasury ETF issuers have been concentrated in issuer, we're probably good to go. But then we look through the regs a little further, and it turns out, lo and behold, the rules from the IRS have one exception. You can concentrate in as much of you want of any one issuer's product, as long as that

issuer is their boss, the U.S. Treasury Department. And that's how all these folks have been allowed to do this for so long. So then we just start asking the exchanges, well, could we actually have a single security? Sure, we don't care. So then we went through the process of saying, all right, well, we'll go. We'll talk to the exchanges. When you talk to the exchanges, these folks are throwing you like a surprise birthday party because everyone wants to be involved in an interesting new idea.

Then you talk to the market makers. And sometimes those meetings feel more like you. You just walked into your own funeral. And a lot of folks, very smart, questioning your idea. It's a shakedown for an hour of just information and concepts and testing your metal. And then we were thrilled to have Jane Street, come on and be our lead market maker. And it was one of those things where when you started peeling it back, really we're just running the risk model. The most of these folks are running anyway.

If you look at the way T-Bill and U-2 and U-10, O Bill and X-Bill trade, they trade just like the underlying. And they move intraday just like the underlying because as a market maker, you're really just trading the treasuries themselves. And then every now and again, you go and create a redeem shares from our fund. But all that is a long-winded way of saying, we were confident that someone would have done this. We are confident that someone would tell us why we couldn't do it once we couldn't find it. And then at some point, and I think for us, and I'll speak for myself, not and my colleagues, but what really did it for us was when we put in the tickers and we actually could get the ticker T-bill and you two, that's when we realized, hmm, maybe this is Kismet.

We're on our way to something. I assume part of it is the fact that this is one of the biggest most liquid markets in the world. So holding one security is probably a lot easier. Since most people don't have a lot of experience buying treasuries, as you said, it's so hard to do. Maybe you could talk to that a little bit about how big this market is and how liquid it is and how probably easy it is for you to trade in and out of these. The market itself is super liquid. It's trillion dollars plus moving through on a regular basis, whether it's the short end

and the more cash market or all the way to the long end, sort of long bonds in the 30 year. The government is regularly reissuing it. The debt limit now is what, $32 trillion? dollars. So it means there's $32 trillion of treasuries floating around that a regular basis. And you can start to do the math of looking at the waiting of that, but assume most of it's from 10 years on down. So that is getting regularly refreshed every day. And on top of it, most folks want to own this first management purposes. Everyone from large corporate treasuries, Disney and Toyota and Ford all the way through financial institutions, down to local banks who need to hold it for

collateral. Some of these guys got themselves in trouble was not understanding how to do that, all the way through individual investors. It's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. What was the thesis when you're putting this together in terms of how you would compete with the I shares of the world who has, God knows how many hundreds, trillions of dollars in fixed income products? So why a specific part of the curve instead of, say, a three to seven, a seven to ten,

something that advisors and investors have been used to dealing with? We thought about how we trade it for our clients, which is we stay on the run or one series old. We try to not get too far into the aged treasuries because they tend to trade different. No one sets out to buy a seven and a half year bond or a 24 and a half year bond. They just kind of happen. And as a result, they have different trading dynamics. So we knew we wanted the behavior for investors that we could replicate.

The same thing you would do if you were buying the futures or the options on futures. You're generally buying the front month contract, maybe the second month. But you're not trying to buy the 37th month back contract. They frankly don't exist. So we wanted to give people that level of precision. the same one that we would use in institutional risk manager portfolios as we had been. And if you look at why many of these indices exist, they're pretty old. And they tend to exist because that's how the government really buckets its own exposure.

A 10-year bond will eventually mature, and it will go through all the life cycle stages and benchmarks along the way. They can never go backwards. So many of these indices were just constructed around that basket of how the government thought about its set of securities. But that wasn't really an investment decision. Like, if you look at some of the ones that track long bonds, so 20 years plus, there's a really big bulge in their distribution around 27 years right now. And that's not because anyone wants to own a 27-a-half-year bond. It's because the government wrote a bunch of stimulus checks and had to borrow heavily to pay for them. And we want to remove the sort of non-investment decisions.

And that said, and you see it in today when you saw an 80 basis point spike in the price or, you know, decreasing the yield of the two-year, being at a single point gives you the flexibility of getting in a, and out, if you start having a pretty wide slope of that curve, you sweep a pretty wide amount of the action, which isn't what you would have necessarily expected. So we want to give folks access to that exact point. Plus, in an ETF, you can short it. So if you thought rates were going to go up, you can now readily play that rates were going to rise, or you can build a spread. We're probably one of the few issuers who's really excited to hear people are shorting their product because that means they're actually using the fullness of the rates tool set we thought we would provide. And I'm amazed how many people reach out every week with a new idea we hadn't

thought of, and some of which we may actually launch in the coming days. Does that mean you're seeing a lot of activity in the underlying ETS themselves more than you would have thought? It's not just people buying and holding these for cash management purposes. People are hedging or making trades or macro calls or whatever. Is there a lot of activity in the underlying ETS themselves? It's a lot of action. We were aspirational. This thing would do well, and we think they have. But we love the creativity we see in it. We see some buying and selling on the short end. We definitely see folks using it as a cash proxy. To your point, why get nothing in a bank account or 50 basis points in a sweep when you can get five points last week, four and a half points today,

you know, in a 90-day product, all the way through folks who are now very clearly expressing a duration view. Shorter today, who've asked us to make sure we launch the long end of the curve to make sure that they have access to go up in duration as the Fed pivots. And then folks to tell us they're shorting and all sorts of other stuff as well as a list in option market where we see folks who are taking very directed bets in the same way you would see someone taking the futures market or the options on futures market. I want to come back to the product, but allow myself to interrupt myself. I just have something I was thinking about this morning. So with what I opened the conversation with in terms of people moving money out of banks,

not because they're necessarily nervous about the counterparty risk per se, but because they can get 4% on treasuries or wherever we are today. It's a little bit lower at some parts of the curve. Let's just say hypothetically, that was a real thing that was tens of billions of dollars deep. All of a sudden investors collectively started to do that. I'm not saying that's happening, but let's just say that they did. Could the buying and selling of treasuries impact the dynamic of the curve above and beyond what Fed policy is trying to accomplish? Or are we really just talking about a drop in the bucket in a market that's so liquid that buying and selling would really have no impact at all. Certainly buying behavior will influence the curve. I mean,

you see today, the Fed didn't change short-term rates and the two-year drop 80 basis points in yield. And I think that's because folks came plowing in and demanded that safety. So when there's true flights to safety, you're going to see that sort of action. Some of it was probably in the native cash market. Some of it was folks hedging out their futures exposure, because they can now be caught on the wrong side of it. All the way through, I'm going to guess a small amount of our ETF, some of the other larger, more established treasury ETFs, that folks are just pile into safety. And I bet if we went back and looked at today versus other, the average day in the year and let's say other March 8, 2020, if you looked at the consolidated tape, you know, when folks

are moving to safety or out of safety, I'm going to bet most of that action starts to happen in the big thematic ETFs. And a lot of that means they just have to pile in, particularly if it's short end treasuries, into whatever they can get their hands on. Supply and demand pressures, if all of a sudden there's a huge demand, price will eventually move towards it. But I think even though the treasury market is big, don't be fooled. I think these sort of sudden movements of cash, even if they're just a few percentage points here or there, can meaningfully impact the price of the underlying bonds. And I think that's what you're seeing today. So let's talk about the, you just mentioned short-term bonds, which I've seen a lot of inflows in the last 12 months.

What are some of the advantages? I'm going to throw yourself off all. What are some of the advantages of using a targeted maturity like your products in a rising rate environment, although maybe that's behind us, as opposed to like a one to three-year type of instrument. Chair Powell has probably got another rate hike in them yet, so we'll see how that goes. It looks like, if you looked at the futures this morning, you would have thought the market was going to drop 10 points, but last I checked, it was still green for the day. But that said, when rates were going up, we were constantly reinvesting and locking in a higher coupon rate, which is ultimately what folks wanted.

Then when rates came back down, you picked back up principal value in the ETF as the bonds became more valuable during that period. And by staying constantly on the run, you weren't worried about trying to get rid of an old bond when liquidity dried up. And that was always the underlying fear. If liquidity dried up, if it was March 8th, 2020 again, you want to make sure that your treasury portfolio is fully liquid at a fair price that isn't dislocated. And so we keep you there. And on the way the rates up, when things are getting volatile, it seemed like liquidity was probably the most undervalued aspect of any investment. And then sure, enough days like today, now you see you need that liquidity because you couldn't rush into

a liquid investment. You wouldn't blow the spread out 80 basis points. You'd blow it out three or four times that. One of the things that surprised a lot of people myself included about this whole Silicon Valley Bank ordeal was the number of depositors ahead of the bank that had more than $250,000 in bank deposits. I don't have the number offhand, but it was a very large number. And I'm sure there was some good reasons for that. The bank was obviously offering some other services that attracted of that capital. But maybe you could just discuss some of the differences between just having money sitting in a checking account at a bank for cash management services and using some shorter term three-month T-bills or 12-month or whatever the time frame is. So I think the number is like

97 percent. It was like some crazy high number. I'm going to guess it wasn't ultra-high net worth individuals, probably a lot of companies as well. But a lot of big companies have a lot of cash, Google, Apple, included, have very developed Treasury departments. And they do what independently we should be doing in our own portfolios, looking at cash and saying, if I put it in the bank, the bank's primary advantage or security. There's a place I could go to and stick a card and ATM machine and it's going to give me cash versus these numbers on a screen. And it's going to be there tomorrow. Whereas the treasury argument is similar. It's full faith and credit of the U.S. government, unless you honestly believe the U.S. government's going to default,

in which case banks are probably not a great place either, for that matter. And now you're going to earn the actual rate in the market. And treasuries are more reactive. to the Fed Funds rate than a bank account. Your bank account's interest rate is set based on what the value of the loan book that ultimately a bank can attract versus their long-term liability management, which is where Silicon Valley Bank got sideways, and then the need to offer value to get folks to give them money so they can continue to lend. The Treasury market is sort of independent of that. It just looks at the underlying Fed Funds rate, the risk in the market, and then the market's net belief in what inflation is going to be in the short run, which is basically

the two-year and then the long-term glist prospects of the U.S., which is ultimately the 10-year. So you get a much more dynamic view of the world. Now, it does require some extra work. If you were to actually be in there and rolling treasuries every week or every few months, it's a lot of work versus just put one in your bank account, get monthly statement online, and just move on with your life. What we did actually allows you to do sort of what most advisors would do for you, which is create a ladder. Spread your risk over a few different durations, so you're not taking all the risk of one point

on the curve. And now you can sort of pick the ones you want. You can dial in the duration you want. And you don't have to keep worrying about rolling off those securities when they mature and then trying to buy the next one. We kind of just handle all that for you. Can you talk about some of the potential tax benefits? You spoke about just being laborious. What other benefits are there to using this in an ETF wrapper other than just going direct? I mean, so ETFs are known for their great tax capabilities. And indeed, we get that. So if the price of the bond goes up, yield drops. we can make that trade with a market maker and it's tax-free, as opposed to paying short-term capital gains on that rural transaction, which is what happens in other style of accounts.

So you get the tax benefit of that. As you might imagine, if you're trying to buy odd lots, a few hundred thousand dollars here or there of treasuries, pricing is a little different than if we come in and buy as a professional buyer and much larger size. And also, we study this every day. It's a little easier for us to go in there, decode the language of what treasuries are, are most folks fail to remember that Treasury's still trading fractions. Michael likes that.

Michael still likes to talk about mortgages in terms of fractions that said decimal points. So he's big on this. Three and one-eighth, not to brag. Well, if you hear a five-year trader, you hear him talking about itties and bitties and yelling and all sorts of stuff that was going on, and bonds still worked that way. And then there's the whole clearing and settlement risk. There's all these other things that you don't think about. Early on, we were doing this product.

We talked to, as we were launching it, a reporter who, I guess, I won't name to protect the guilty. said, you know, I trade some bonds and some strips of my PA account four times a year. And every time it's like strap myself in after lunch, buckle up and hope to be finished by midnight, because I have to like retrain myself how to think about all this stuff. Eric Balchina said that. Yeah, right? How do you handle the process of paying out the yield? Because I think for Treasury bonds, it's every six months.

And then if you buy a T bill, you're effectively buying it at a discount and getting paid back at par. So how do you handle the payment of the yield out to the ETF investors? So when we roll the trade, we just generate sort of the net value that we need to pay out on the dividend. So on the two year, which is once a month, it just naturally coincides with when we're going to roll the trade. We look at what the coupon rate and yield of the trade was, and we just generate that much cash and we pay it out as opposed to reinvesting it into the fund. On the T-bill side, every time we make a roll, we set aside the accreted value of the bond from when we bought it to then, and then we ultimately pay that out at the end of the month. Okay, so it's like monthly income for all these products.

Yep, exactly. So remind me again, which parts of the curve are currently offered? So the 90 day, we're called T bill, the six month, X bill, the one year, O bill, then the two year, which is U2, U2, U2, and then the 10 year, and we've got a few others coming out by the end of the month. We'll have the 30 year, so the long bond side, the 20 year, and the five year to give folks sort of full access to all the key tenors. And I would imagine the short end has gotten the most attention? It has. And it's been a surprise. I mean, when we did this, the project name internally was U10, where like, everyone should buy the tenure. And we frankly were surprised to see the tenure be the slowest out of the gates for anyone. It's the tenure. Like everything is based off the tenure. It is like the underlying risk model of the global financial infrastructure. And it just was in a yield hole. Why would you buy a 10 year with duration on it when you could buy a two year or a 90 day, get more yield, and less risk. We saw today a severe, what is it called when the curve restapens, but it's still inverted?

No one's really thought about that. It's like a inverting flattener sort of thing. Like, it's weird. So there was extraordinary action in the fixed income market. Jim Bianco shared a chart showing that it was like a hundred basis point drop in the three year, which the only time that's ever happened was right after the crash for 1987. we saw similar moves in 2001 after the 9-11 attack in 2008 when Lehman failed, when the Tarp vote failed. So extraordinary moves. Is it too early to say what sort of investor decisions are being made

just with your products? Is it too early? But we see a lot of volume in. We've seen some net creations on the back of that as well. So folks are clearly flying to safety. And I think that's fair to say from just looking at the yields. It's fair to say from the volumes and the phone calls we've got starting Friday, but over the weekend and early this morning. But that said, last time these things happened, like we named days after this, black this and 9-11. This probably won't be remembered as like March, what is say, the 13th? That probably won't go down as black March 13th, but it really should because these were massive, massive moves. I don't know what we're going to call it, maybe the bank run of 2023. I don't think I will ever forget the weekend that just

past. It was incredibly stressful. Bank runs are not something that we're accustomed to. A bank run in the digital age made it even quicker. So I don't know what we're going to look back and refer to this on. But I wrote last week that investors, certainly equity investors, we all sign a contract with whoever that volatility is to be expected. We know that intuitively. You get risk, reward. But forget about fixed income. Like economic volatility, that only happens when there's like shocks to the system. And I think just safe to say that hopefully we stem the crisis. But this was a crisis. It was just not just a run of the banks, but a run of confidence and too early to say how this plays out, but it was scary. It was. I mean, and it should be better remembered.

My fear is it was so quick that our memories will quickly erase it. It didn't have enough time to sit in and scare people. And the Fed and the Treasury Department and the FDIC stood up right away and did the right thing. And they did it in a very clever way. Winding the discount window was a very easy way to do this, avoids calling it a real bailout, but sort of is. It's just one that can be used more electively, that everyone needed it right away. But it was a frightening thing. But I think, to your point, maybe we won't call it the great bank run, it'll be the great app run, because I don't know how many folks actually showed up at the bank

themselves. I think most of them just logged into an app, hit a button, transfer the money to their fidelity or their Schwab account, and moved on with their lives. Yeah, that's a good point. I did see some video of some folks lining up outside of First Republic Bank in California and kind of wondering, like, I watched the video, they're all standing there on an iPhone or smartphone, standing in the queue at the bank. It's like, I don't mean to laugh because it's not funny, but are you talking to advisors

or is this pretty self-explanatory? We talk to advise all the time. I think most of it is just reassuring folks. It's as simple as we talk about it as. They're not missing anything. They're not missing anything. We could have done this in like a much more academically pleasing way with futures and options and all sorts of volatility curves and wild people with math and science.

We didn't do any of that because that's not what we wanted to own. That wasn't what we wanted people to own. we wanted them to understand exactly what we were doing and just appreciate we would do that in a way that was more scalable for them or tax efficient and allow them to put it into a rebalance or not have to think about it. Being an advisor, being into an investor, you've got a lot going on in your life. Being a treasury expert probably isn't one of them. So leave that to us, but let's give you the exact thing you see on TV and the exact thing that we would do for our professional clients in the simplest way possible. That was a great place to close it. But Ben,

if you've got one more follow up, go ahead. I'm just curious if you have a lot of advisors who are trying to create their own sort of duration and maybe owning two or three of the funds and shifting one way or another and having some tilts. Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of folks who have a duration view. They like us, were stymied and upset by the fact that the multi-bond funds have duration that moves around on you all the time. So they're constantly rebalancing.

And now they can dial that number in more or less exactly, set and forget. And that seems to be very popular. So, Alex, if advisors or individual investors want to learn more, where should we send them? U.S. Treasureretf.com, that's got everything. The website's got everything. I'm certain there's a way that they can find us. The PM still pick up the phone. So if you want to know, you'll probably hear from one of us and hear the same story. Awesome. Thanks so much, Alex. We appreciate the time. Thank you. Okay, thanks to Alex. Thanks again to U.S. Benchmark Series member, check out their website,

USTREStreas.com to learn about their suite of products. Send us an email, animal spiritspot at gmail.com. Thank you.