I have never owned a long term treasury bond directly in my brokerage account. If I buy 30 year treasury bonds in a Schwab brokerage account will they be priced or valued "real time" like a stock or ETF, or end of day like a mutual fund, or something else? It seems like my ST treasury bills are never valued but carried at cost.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
I've seen brokerage statements where holders of specific bonds (Treasury, Munis, Corporate) had no information printed where FMV should be, which I suppose is reasonable enough, and then the coupon payments usually appear in another section of the statement. I suppose that's standard but I have no way of knowing that.
It wouldn't surprise me if that's how specific bonds are handled. I'd think you'd have to have a bond fund, that got traded every single day by many people, to make it worthwhile to track FMV of one share of the fund versus a single, particular bond that the owner may or may not ever sell. Granted, one should be able to formulate a FMV using whatever algorithm the purchaser of the bond would use to determine its price, but perhaps your broker as the custodian doesn't know what algorithm that would be (because they don't know who would buy it ahead of time) or else does not wish to imply any stated value for something that's not so well known?
The short of it at Vanguard they appear to me to be valued real-time. You can buy and sell them quickly like a stock through the bond desk. Interest is transparently swept into your linked money market account at Vanguard. It's about as easy as it can get.
Interesting. Has anyone ever seen such fair market valuations on a paper statement for an individual bond? I buy all bonds in funds or ETFs rather than individually so I don't know.
