Fading confidence that the Federal Reserve will keep cutting interest rates has sent the 10-year Treasury yield back up over 4 per cent. That has proven painful for a lot of people who keep betting rates will fall.

Finance being an industry that has never had a lot of gender diversity, investments that prove awfully and continuously bad are sometimes called “widow-maker trades”. Shorting Japanese government bonds is the cliché widow-maker, while some think shorting Chinese government bonds will be this generation’s ultimate pain trade.

This is a near-$60bn ETF focused on long-maturity Treasuries. Investors who use it to bet on a dovish shift in monetary policy keep taking a pounding.

What is really remarkable is that investors seemingly can’t resist putting more money into TLT despite the repeated walloping.

Koyfin data indicates that the ETF has taken in another $1.45bn over the past week, lifting its 12-month inflows to $17.5bn. That’s despite sliding 9 per cent since mid-September, which has pushed 2024 performance back into negative territory (-6.7 per cent at pixel time).

Even TMF, a triple-leveraged version of TLT that has lost almost 20 per cent over the past month, has seen inflows of $133.4mn in the last week, according to the data provider.

How long will the punishment continue? Probably not nearly long enough to earn a place next to JGBs, Tesla or nat-gas in the widow-maker hall of fame. But as long as the US economy stays remarkably strong it’s going to be painful.