Literally every investment guru will tell you to allocate bonds in your portfolio. With interest rates already so low, is holding onto bonds in the long term STILL a good idea?

On the contrary, I don’t think many great investors like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Cathie Wood, Phillip Fisher, Benjamin Graham, Mark Cuban have ever mentioned investing in bonds. They are fully in stocks. These people are just a few examples, the list goes on. The people who advocate for bonds are mostly fund managers/economists, I’ll leave it up to you to decide how good you think they are in generating returns.

Locally, Adam Khoo also mentions he only invests in stocks.

I agree with you, bonds rarely beat inflation, it could in the past where yields could be 6-8%. However, rarely do bonds beat inflation, that’s how they can assure you such a yield.

To me, and many other great investors have spoken on this as well, bonds are a guaranteed lost of money with such Low yields that can’t even beat inflation.

There are however, times where bonds come in handy. Short term bonds for 1-3 year period. Where say you are saving up for a big purchase such as a car, wedding, housing down payment etc...

We may not want to touch this sum of money we need in the relatively short term. Then we can put this sum of money into short term bonds to generate slightly higher yield instead of leaving it in the bank.​​​

Interesting question. Personally I don't really take the bonds argument for portfolio allocation. Same thing with gold. And I saw both "hedging" approaches adopted by the robo-advisors which delayed my decision to start accounts with them.

In portfolio theory, the approach was to diversify with assets of different beta so that it balances out fluctuations in the portfolio value. But I also believe there are other ways to achieve this, eg keeping the uninvested money in cash or high interest bearing accounts. Some investment funds use gold too.

Personally I view cash / cpf / reits as tools I would prefer more to achieve this hedging effect than bonds or gold.

I actually have less faith in bonds than cash or cpf, since I did grow up through the Asian financial crisis, and I have been reading a lot of books on debt, where there are frequent examples of countries not honoring their bonds or debts. For one, it is really unclear if Donald Trump remains president, whether the US government would actually honor their debt (especially to China).

In March 2020, the weird fluctuations in all asset prices happened... There were times that bonds and gold suffered worse than stocks. Well that was crazy, but I think the lesson I learnt was if we are deploying in bonds or gold purely for the hedging effect, it may not actually have such an effect.

I just think cash and cash-like equivalents is more practical (and you do not incur fees in this process of trying to hedge).

P. S. Just to be clear, when I said I use Ssb, I do not use it as a means to hedge my investment portfolio. I buy SSB to manage the emergency funds between my 360 account / ssb. It has an incidental effect of hedging my overall interest rate impact on the mortgage, but the amount of ssb I buy is too small to mean anything right now.