Money - Family. Do you know about this great plan for a secure, long-term investment?

The first was issued in 1985. Treasury bonds (OAT) are securities issued by the French government in the medium and long term to borrow money on the financial markets.

They allow it, in particular, to finance its sovereign debt. As this increases (more than 3,000 billion euros in 2025), new OATs are regularly issued to repay those that are coming to maturity.

The OAT market is accessible to everyone. Individual investors can therefore purchase them on the secondary market and hold them in a securities account.

He can also turn to bond funds or mutual funds by choosing the appropriate investment package: life insurance, capitalization contract or Retirement Savings Plan (PÉR).

A bond being neither more nor less than a debt contracted by the issuer towards the investor, the former undertakes to repay the capital borrowed from the latter at a given maturity.

During this period, interest (called coupons) is paid regularly at a rate that may be fixed or variable (indexed to inflation, for example).

Recently, rising interest rates have made the bond market more attractive. Moreover, while corporate bonds carry a certain amount of risk, OATs are considered very safe since they are issued by the government.

Certainly, their issue period can be very long (from two to 50 years), but like any security they are transferable at any time.

Due to the volatility of interest rates, this duration is an essential factor in assessing the return/risk ratio. Thus, those issued over two years generally offer lower interest rates than very long-term OATs.

Investors tend to opt for 10-year OATs, which represent a good compromise between risk and return. In 2024, their yield was around 3%.

Another advantage of OATs is that they allow investors to diversify their portfolios. However, to ensure good diversification between different assets, it is important that they are not too correlated with each other.

In other words, a decline in one does not cause the other to decline. Decorrelating your investments is therefore essential to minimize risk.

We can even go as far as what we call negative correlation: the rise of one asset automatically causes another asset to fall.

So, if you have real estate assets, investing in OATs becomes interesting since these two investments are historically negatively correlated.