Stats › Valuation › Corporate bonds
The US corporate bond market
When a company needs money it can sell you a piece of itself, or it can borrow from you. Borrowing at scale means issuing bonds, and the pile of those bonds is a market most equity people never look at properly. It's bigger than you'd guess, it barely trades, and it behaves nothing like the stock market you're used to.
This page covers four things. How large the US corporate bond market actually is and where it sits inside the wider bond world. How little of it changes hands on a given day, and why that single fact shapes everything else about the asset class. The BBB argument, which is the one credit story that reaches the mainstream press, including the part of it that's gone out of date. And what taking credit risk has genuinely paid you over ninety years, once you strip out the interest rate risk that comes bundled with it. I put it together because bonds get talked about as the boring half of a portfolio and then people are surprised when the boring half does something they didn't expect. In 2025 US investment grade returned minus 1.04% while US high yield returned plus 8.50%. Same asset class, opposite outcome, for reasons that make complete sense once you know what each one is actually exposed to.
A word on the figures: two respectable sources publish daily volume numbers about 35% apart, and I've put both on the page rather than choosing. The notes at the bottom explain what I could and couldn't reconcile, and every source is linked so you can form your own view.
US corporate bonds outstanding reached $11.7 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, about 23% of the $50.5 trillion US fixed income market. Issuance ran $1.52 trillion in the first half of 2026, up 28% year on year. The market trades far less than its size suggests: average daily volume is around $69 billion on one measure, which turns over the whole market roughly twice a year against many times a day for equities. The credit risk premium is real and small: 137 basis points a year over duration matched Treasuries for investment grade since 1936, on a Sharpe ratio of 0.37 against 0.50 for the S&P 500.
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