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Investors are putting their money into bonds again, confounding experts who have long expected them to continue switching into riskier assets such as stocks. To understand why, it helps to assess who those investors are and how they think.

Not long ago, the script seemed straightforward. Having surged in the midst of the “flight to quality” triggered by the 2008 global financial crisis and the recession that followed, the prices of U.S. Treasury bonds were supposed to fall — aided and abetted by an economic recovery, less policy accommodation on the part of the Federal Reserve and the exhaustion of the European debt crisis. This would push up the bonds’ yields, which serve as the foundation for interest rates on everything from mortgages to corporate bonds.

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The trend was supposed to prompt investors to pull large chunks of money out of bond funds, fueling a “great rotation” in asset allocation that would favor equities in particular. This rotation would be large and prolonged, given the extent to which retail investors had shied away from the stock market after the 2008 debacle and, instead, poured into bonds.