Subject: Re: OT: T-bills
tl;dr Bills are not tradeable, you want strips. Perhaps no suitable strips on retail market, but I think someone with your buying power could access the full market where there should be loads of choice.


Long version, written while I was working out the answer:

I guess you might be looking for gilt "strips" if you really want no coupons. (Didn't remember that jargon at first.)

Edit: ah, I see there are now UK Treasury Bills, up to 1 year, no coupon. A new innovation at some point that I didn't notice! A search (which I have now closed! d'oh!) said they are held to maturity, so that implies that you can't trade them. Brave search confirms that. So you want strips then, or low coupon gilts (maybe linkers?) where most of the return is capital - quite a few of those to choose from.

I did a search and looked at a couple of sites and this one lists a few strips up to 9 years out (2025/27/29/34):
https://www.hl.co.uk/shares/co...
So none of these really fit the maturity you want.

I think this list is limited by trading via thing*, but given the amounts of money you would be using, I would guess IB could access the "proper" bond market for you, but that's beyond my ken! I only trade small amounts :-) Presumably the full range of strips would be available there, I think there should be *loads* to choose from. This web page has [err ... no it doesn't] a link to the current full list a couple of paragraphs down:
https://www.dmo.gov.uk/respons...
Ah, doesn't seem to list strips :-(

Maybe this link has something useful if you register: https://www.tradeweb.com/our-m...
Yes! https://www.dmo.gov.uk/help/fa... gives this tradeweb link as well and says it includes strips.

(I worked at a bank on settlement systems for gilts and bonds for a while, 2-3 decades ago, but I don't know anything about trading them, only that the sizes are HUUUGEE in the institutional market. One time I had to re-code some C program using long doubles just so that we had enough precision to store the numbers. And the Tokyo systems we interfaced with insisted on calculations being accurate to 1 Yen!)

I find it hard to believe this is of any help to you (and IB), but since you've been so good to the BRK board for so long, I thought I could make a small effort. UK gilts and the FTSE 250 trackers (UK mid-caps, more like small-caps in the US market) look ok/good to me just now, a decent expected return (maybe growth 2-4% above inflation, plus the divi??) and a useful yield while waiting. And based in GBP, which doesn't seem over-valued, maybe even under-valued :-)

SA

* I forget the name, the retail-oriented gilt trading platform that the brokers use in the background