Investing in Bonds the ETF way

Depending on an intester's trading outlook (eg age to retirement), investment advisors suggest various ratios of bonds to stocks. But bonds are harder to buy than stocks and bond mutual funds can have high expense ratios. In my view the easier way to buy bonds is with an Exchange Traded Fund. Several below are highlighted:

• BND
• AGG
• LQD
• TIP
• HYG

The above Yahoo Finance chart illustrates the relative stability of AGG and BND against IBM, the DOW and the S&P 500 over the last year. Bond investing is not "exciting" investing but it is very conservative. Yahoo Finance provides the Morningstar profile for each. Helpful for investers:

MacroWorld is another helpful site that provides charting and reporting. The example below is the Sector Allocation for BND:

Bond ETFs

The Beta Investment Report: U.S. Bond ETFs

 Excerpt:

[On] the short list of investment-grade U.S. bond funds that cover the waterfront in this corner of the capital markets.

The first point to note is that the short list really is short. That’s partly because there’s only a handful of ETFs that cover the broad spectrum of investment-grade bonds in the U.S. in one fell swoop. We’re talking here of Treasuries, government agencies, corporates, and a small amount of international dollar-denominated bonds (inflation-protected Treasuries and munis are excluded, however). We’re also limiting the choices to market-cap weighted benchmarks exclusively in the ETF space. That leaves us with four choices, as shown in the table

Comment: The absolute easiest way to invest in bonds is through a Bond ETF. We have investments in both BND and AGG. Neither are exciting (like an IBM) but they are stable.