History. You’re witnessing it.

You witness history by default, every day, but when we carry on about bearing witness, we generally mean something extraordinary’s afoot. Currently, in markets, that something’s the first-ever rolling 10-year loss for longer-dated US government obligations, or the first such loss in a century anyway.

The figure below, from BofA’s Michael Hartnett, gives you a sense of the toll exacted by the post-pandemic bond bear, which is proving to be a tenacious beast.

“At no time in the past 90 years has the 10-year rolling return from US Treasurys been negative,” Hartnett wrote. “It is now.”

Bonds were off to a decidedly inauspicious start in 2025, but things turned around in recent days courtesy of favorable reads on US producer and consumer prices.

To be sure, there’s still a lot of hesitation out there about grabbing at this particular falling knife. None of the various and sundry macro-policy factors behind the rekindled long-end selloff (which pushed 20- and 30-year US yields beyond 5% last week) are “resolved.” But, as the figure below shows, the popular UST bond ETF’s on pace for its best week since late November.

In a mid-week note, Nomura’s vol desk cited “some signs of modest demand for new risk longs” in the belly of the curve, after UST flows “had already pivoted into the first semblance of net demand we’d seen in quite some time.”

“Even before the inflation data, we’d been seeing a few different belly lifts from our international franchise earlier in the week,” Charlie McElligott said. Post-data, there was “some real money buying in USTs on top of spec and potential short-dated systematic trend covers,” he added, before documenting call-buying in TLT.

So, is it time to buy the bonds? Maybe, according to BofA’s Hartnett, who suggested the first 10-year rolling loss from US Treasurys might well mark “the peak in the ‘anything but bonds’ trade of the 2020s.”

Now who wants to lose a finger or three?