A traditional investment advisor would advise an individual to put 20% to 40% of your money into bonds. The bond market is not a safe place to be at the moment. If you must own bonds, concentrate on shorter durations. The fundamentals for owning any bonds are just not their. The risk/reward ratio is terrible.
Treasury Bond Yields:
Corporate Bond Yields:
Yield and spread on agency mortgage-backed securities: 
In the long term, all bonds and any derivatives based on bonds, are going to suffer.
However, I don’t plan to short bonds because I don’t believe the bond bull is dead. I don’t plan to go long bonds because there is no fundamental reason to own them. The only reason to go long bonds, at this point, is because investors around the world think they are a safe investment. They are very wrong. But until the psychology of the market changes, the best action is to stay away. The bond bears have been around for 10 years. From the above charts, you can see they have done nothing but lose money year after year.
The original widow-maker was shorting Japanese Government Bonds (JGB). No matter how much debt Japan racked up, JGB’s continued to rally from 1990 all the way up to present day. It has been almost 30 years since 1990. I have no intention of making the same mistake predecessors made.