End-of-Quarter Portfolio Rejiggering Rattles Shaky Markets

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Investors have been a trigger-happy lot this week, gobbling up risky securities one day and dumping them the next.

But while the European debt crisis dominated the conversation in the market, a key factor behind the turmoil was the fact that it's the end of the quarter.

Quarter-end is always a big deal for large, conservative investors like insurance companies and pension funds, which typically face self-imposed limits on their risk-taking and on how much they can hold in different investments. Those rules mean that at quarter-end they place buy or sell orders just to get back in line with their mandates.

1:01 (Dow Jones) The outperformance of the 30-year Treasury bond even turns the benchmark 10-year note into a relative laggard despite the latter's deeper liquidity. The extra yield investors demand to own 30s rather than 10s is 1.019 percentage points, the narrowest spread since July 2010 . It was 1.262 the day before the unveiling of Operation Twist last week. Some investors say the planned Fed buying will keep the 30-year yield falling in coming months, making the trade of buying 30s and selling 10s attractive. Some traders expect the yield gap to drop to as low as 0.75 point the next couple of months. (min.zeng@ dowjones.com)

Fed to begin 'Operation Twist' on Monday

The New York Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Friday that it would begin Treasury purchases and sales on Monday as part of the program dubbed "Operation Twist" announced by policy makers earlier this month. The Fed will buy long-term debt on Monday, Tuesday and Friday and inflation-linked debt on Wednesday. It will sell one-year debt on Thursday, the Fed said on its schedule posted on its web site.

- Deborah Levine