What are the different types of corporate bonds?
Sarah Garza
Updated on February 10, 2026
There are five basic categories of corporate bonds: public utilities, transportations, industrials, banks and finance companies, and international issues. The five categories can be further broken down.
How do investment grade corporate bonds differ from speculative grade corporate bonds?
The investment-grade category has four rating grades while the speculative-grade category is comprised of six rating grades. While a speculative-grade credit rating indicates a higher default probability, these bonds typically compensate investors for the higher risk by paying higher interest rates, or yields.
What are the four types of bonds in business?
There are many types of bonds, including government, corporate, municipal and mortgage bonds. Government bonds are generally the safest, while some corporate bonds are considered the most risky of the commonly known bond types. For investors, the biggest risks are credit risk and interest rate risk.
What is the most common type of corporate bond?
Fixed rate bonds
Fixed rate bonds typically make semiannual interest payments. They’re currently the most common type of corporate bond.
What are the major types of bonds?
There are three primary types of bonding: ionic, covalent, and metallic.
- Ionic bonding.
- Covalent bonding.
- Metallic bonding.
Why are corporate bonds good for a multi asset portfolio?
• Corporate bonds have historically enhanced the return on multi-asset portfolios, and long-history data going back to the 1930s suggest that corporate bonds have earned positive and statistically significant returns in excess of government bonds.
What’s the best way to build a bond portfolio?
Dividing bonds into three categories—core bonds, international bonds and aggressive income bonds—can be a good start toward building a diversified fixed income portfolio. The global bond market surpasses the global stock market in terms of both size and complexity.
Which is the best way to invest in corporate bonds?
As a private investor, you have three main options to access corporate bonds: A collective scheme (such as an exchange-traded fund) will pool your money with other investors and spread it across a ready-made portfolio of corporate bonds.
What to look for in a corporate bond allocation?
For an investor who has decided on a non-zero corporate bond allocation, the focus should be on the drivers of the yield difference, or spread, between corporate and government bonds. A large literature in academic finance, covering both theory and empirics, attempts to account for the variation in credit spreads.