I have a friend who's really bad with "timing."
Tell him that the party starts at 7 p.m., and he arrives at 8:16, still getting dressed in the car – tucking his shirt in as he enters the door.
Just recently, he called me and asked what I thought of the 10-year Treasury bond.
"Is 2.1% on your money a decent return for the next 10 years?" I asked him by way of an answer. "Treasuries are dynamite – if your goal is to lose money to inflation while loaning money to an irresponsible, spendthrift government."
As I write this, the U.S. 10-year bond has fallen from 2.13% to just 2.08%. We had a brief, unconvincing rally on Tuesday, but that wasn't enough to stop investors making a beeline out of global equities markets and into the safe haven of America's bond markets.
To use an overused phrase, these (understandably) safety-seeking investors are "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," or "fixing the barn door after the horses have bolted."
Put another way, those investors will find, to their chagrin, that the "conventional" safe-haven investments are either underwhelming or – let's face it – underwater.
Still, we need to be safe. Stocks can rally some more, but mark my words: We won't have to wait long before another Trump tweet – or geopolitical punch-up, or trade war, or scandal – sends stocks hurtling to the floor again.
So we'd better make a beeline ourselves, to these shares I'm about to show you. They're safe – ironclad, even – they throw off yield like it's going out of style.