Trying to pick tops in bull markets and bottoms in a bear is usually a worthless endeavor as there is a large graveyard of calls that were made at the wrong time, sometimes defined by years and decades (if you tried in Japanese bonds). But, if successful there is much money to be made and capital to be preserved.
With respect to the 35-year bond bull market globally, there have been many attempts over the years to say 'this can't go on any longer' especially with plunging bond yields driven by central bankers, exploding sovereign and corporate debt levels, and fears of central bank driven inflation via massive amounts of money printing. I'm now going to be one of those strategists/investors that is going to call the bottom in global interest rates and the top in prices.
I believe there has been a sea change in the behavior of sovereign bonds and something very amiss over the past two months. A lot is being made over what the Federal Reserve will or won't do this week but what investors should be most focused on right now is the longer end of global yield curves. The canary in the mine is now singing and that is the weakness in longer term Japanese Government Bonds and that I believe is the genesis for this uptick now globally in rates.
The Bank of Japan is the epicenter for the greatest experiment of monetary activism (I prefer calling it monetary madness) that we've seen in terms of the size of its quantitative easing relative to its economy. Therefore, changes out of Japan will have ripple effects everywhere. The BoJ and its governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, seem to be coming to the conclusion that destroying one's banking system by depriving banks of profits via flattening the yield curve to a pancake is probably not a good idea.