Geldanlage: So profitieren ETF-Anleger von hohen Renditen bei Firmenbonds

Frankfurt - More and more companies are financing themselves on the European market for Euro-bonds, offering high interest rates. Recently, the travel portal Booking.com offered new bonds, while the British bank Barclays and the German industrial gas company Linde are among the recent issuers. They provided returns of up to four percent for bonds with maturities of five to seven years.

However, retail investors are excluded from this market. Most companies keep their bonds with minimum investment amounts of 100,000 euros for institutional investors only. Retail investors can buy bonds via low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but the real charm of bonds - the annual return calculated from the purchase date until the bond's maturity - is lost.

The reason is that bond returns arise from the interaction of interest payments over the bond's duration, the purchase price, and the redemption price of 100 percent. Unlike the bonds themselves, ETFs have no fixed end duration. This means that to make a profit with bond ETFs, either the prices of the bonds in the fund need to rise or at least not fall so sharply that they eat up the interest payments.

For the past three years, there have also been exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for Euro-bonds from companies, allowing investors to adopt a buy-and-hold strategy. These ETFs are becoming increasingly popular, with more than 15 billion euros invested by iShares, a part of the Blackrock fund house, alone. Paul Jung from Blackrock's distribution told a recent podcast with the Frankfurt Stock Exchange that ETFs are now being bought not only by private investors but also by institutional ones. The Handelsblatt explains what investors need to know about bond ETFs with fixed end durations.