Such bond issues, which often use complicated jargon such as ''coupon'' and require you to invest through a stockbroker, sound exotic to those of us who are more used to sticking our money in a savings account, but our forebears would have found them easy to understand.
The Victorians were vastly fond of buying bonds to fund everything from bridge-building to war, and devotees of Georgette Heyer's Regency novels will know that anyone who was anyone invested in ''consols'', or government-backed securities.
Since then, individual investors have divided ourselves between the two camps of shares and savings, ignoring bonds, which sit somewhere in the middle when it comes to risk and reward. Bonds became hard to buy and sell in small denominations, and the prices and spreads on selling and buying are quirkier and more difficult to understand for less experienced investors.
The London Stock Exchange has done its best to change this with its Order Book for Retail Bonds, while investors who are fed up with the poor returns they are getting from their bank are being squarely targeted by these new offerings. The biggest fly in the bond ointment is inflation, which tends to be bad for bond investors as a whole, as it reduces the purchasing power of fixed income and capital repayments.
Institutional investors have profited from corporate bonds for years, and retail investors have more recently flocked to bond funds too. Whether stand-alone retail bonds will be embraced by the British public remains to be seen. In the meantime, people must understand what they are buying.
A bond is not a savings account, and even the John Lewis name is not a cast iron, Le Creuset guarantee.
A rollover victory
Good news from EDF Energy, one of the gas and electricity companies that have been offering controversial ''rollover" contracts to their customers.
These contracts are the enemy of those of us who forget to open our post, since they mean that if you don't switch away from your energy provider at the end of your contract, you could find yourself paying massive fees for getting out of a renewed contract that you never even signed up to.
The company says it has decided to phase out its rollover contracts "following customer feedback" ? not to mention this newspaper's campaign. Rivals British Gas and Scottish Power should follow suit.
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