Archives for November 2005

Reader Dan pointed out an interesting (well, kind of) research article [pdf] that, amongst other things, explains how Treasury auctions work. As stated on the Treasury Direct site, you can buy T-Bills through either a competitive or non-competitive bid. On the surface, it would seem that you would want to put in a competitive bid to get the best price. But it’s a little fuzzier than that. If you put in a noncompetitive bid, you are just about guaranteed a bill to buy. Everyone else put in a bid for what they are willing to pay, but may not get it.

After reading the article, I put together a little example on how the bidding process works. As usual, please point out my blunders.
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Treasury Bills are usually issued on the same day each week, making it easy to re-invest T-Bills at maturity. Someone brought up a good point – what if that day is a holiday? Reader Dan pointed out that the Treasury already thought of that, and adjusts the issue and/or maturity 1 day accordingly. For example, 4-week (28-day) T-Bills are usually issued and matured on Thursday, but next week Thursday 11/24 is Thanksgiving. So, the T-Bill issued on 10/27 is actually a 29-day T-Bill, maturing on Friday 11/25. Accordingly, there is a 27-day T-Bill scheduled for issue on that Friday too. They all match up, so at least that’s one less thing to worry about.

I’ve also added a new category devoted to Treasury Bills and Bonds and moved all related entries there.

It turns out automatically reinvesting Treasury Bills upon maturity is pretty straightforward, according to this TreasuryDirect link. I must say, there is a lot of information on all those government sites, but they sure make it hard to find it!

For example, for 4-week T-Bills, they both mature and issue on Thursdays. But if you set your maturing T-Bills to pay out into a Certificate of Indebtedness (C of I), and your to-be-issued T-Bill to fund from the same C of I, then the maturing T-Bill will first pay out money into the account before the 2nd one takes it out. So (most of) your money will effectively be “reinvested” into another T-Bill.
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Thanks to reader Brent who reminded me that the new Treasury Bill auction results are out today. The 4-week, 13-week, and 26-week are paying 3.997%, 4.004%, and 4.345% respectively. This bodes very well for the 4-week T-Bill ladder I am currently building. Last week I bought a $1,000 4-week T-Bill at 3.885%, this week I’m getting another one at 3.997%, which is the equivalent bank rate of 4.54% for my tax situation. I’m going to be setting up a 4-week auto-renewing ladder at TreasuryDirect once I have 4 of these bought. That way they’ll just cycle through each other, renewing automatically at maturity, and I won’t have a thing to do but watch the interest pile up (and faster than at Emigrent Direct). More later.