BOND ILLUSION: ARE INVESTORS CHASING CLARITY OR YIELD?

In My Financial Career, Stephen Leacock’s short story set in the early 1900s, the protagonist walks into a bank in London with the ambition of opening an account.

- Amit Gopal is director at Paterson Wealth.

What follows is a comic misadventure — guided from counter to counter, overwhelmed by the machinery of finance, he grows so distraught that he abandons the enterprise and resolves to keep his money in his socks.

One hundred years on, marble counters have been replaced by slick apps and onboarding. Yet Leacock’s insight endures: when it comes to financial products, what you are shown and what you get are rarely the same. In India, bonds have never been more fashionable. Fintech platforms have made buying one feel simple—curated yields, clean interfaces, and the suggestion that here is an alternative to equities. Regulators have cheered them on, convinced that democratizing access is the same as understanding. Into this has walked the retail investor—anxious about volatile markets and searching for something predictable.

The instrument is not the problem