Tonight, a Wall Street Journal article about falling AI stocks and Treasury yields prompted me to investigate corporate bonds—and the difficulty finding basic information made me wonder whether the lack of information on bond reasons explains why so few individuals hold individual corporate bonds.
The market moves today October 22, 2026 were unusually large:
The Nasdaq fell 2.6%, its biggest one-day decline since June.
The PHLX Semiconductor Index declined 6.7%, while the VanEck Semiconductor ETF fell approximately 6.0%.
The 10-year Treasury yield fell about 19 basis points to 4.95%, its largest daily decline since March 2023. Treasury prices rose as investors sought safety.
Were investors demanding more compensation for lending to AI companies even as Treasury yields fell? Was this a trend?
I was excited. Maybe this was the time for me to get a high yield on a fixed income asset issued by a beaten-down but fundamentally strong company.
I asked ChatGPT for a table comparing selected bond yields and their spreads over the 10-year Treasury, now and one month earlier, for Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, and CoreWeave.
We found recent yields but could not readily assemble comparable month-earlier observations for the same bonds. Purchasing comprehensive information on bond prices from Bloomberg or FINRA is expensive. Our unsuccessful search does not establish that the information is unavailable. It does show that obtaining a basic comparison was harder than it should have been.
Part of the explanation may be the small audience for information about individual bonds. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances reports that 19% of families directly owned individual stocks, compared with just 1.3% directly owning bonds other than U.S. savings bonds. The bond category includes Treasury, municipal and other securities as well as corporate bonds.
Many households instead own bonds indirectly through funds and retirement accounts.
A conventional bond fund does not fully meet my objective. I want to consider individual bonds with specified repayment dates. A fund offers diversification, but it does not promise to return my principal on a maturity date. An individual bond provides scheduled repayment of face value if the issuer does not default, although its market price can fall before maturity.
Meanwhile, Wall Street is expanding efforts to sell individual investors private-credit products, which can involve substantial fees, limited withdrawals, difficult-to-verify valuations and leverage. Yet we still struggle to obtain basic information needed to evaluate more conventional corporate bonds. Before celebrating access to increasingly complex investments, the industry should make it easier to understand and purchase the bonds already available.