10-year real yield falls to 2.64%: what the retreat means for TLT, gold and growth stocks

The market's most important number last week was not the record stock tape or the price of oil. It was the retreat in real interest rates. The 10-year Treasury Inflation-Protected Security yield, the real yield that strips out inflation expectations and forms the true discount rate on long-duration assets, eased to 2.64 percent on October 22 from 2.80 to 2.77 percent earlier in the week, per Federal Reserve data via FRED (DFII10). In the same session the nominal 10-year Treasury yield fell to 4.96 percent from 5.13 percent the day before, a 17 basis point drop in a single day (DGS10), while the dollar held near 101.7 on the DXY. That combination, softer real yields against a stable dollar, i…