Generating 6% Yield In A 0% World - Building Exchange Traded Debt Ladders

Introduction
This is Part III of a series of articles on Exchange Traded Debt (ETD). The reader should review Part I Exchange Traded Debt - Strong Income for Yield Starved Investors and Part II Exchange Traded Debt : the Post-Brexit edition as background material before reading this article.
Many bond investors use the idea of bond laddering to reduce interest rate risk, duration risk and default risk while maximizing income consistency and opportunity potential. How applicable is this kind of technique to Exchange Traded Debt (ETD) investing? My first thought was that the idea might be a misfit due to a much smaller, less liquid and perhaps "lumpy" set of investment opportunities. However, instead of just guessing, let's look at the data!
First, we ran a screen which sorted the available ETD securities by maturity date (by this we mean mandatory maturity date, not the early callable date). A portion of the resulting table is depicted below, namely the early maturity issues. The later maturity issue portion is included in the Appendix of this article:
Several important insights come into focus by examining this table including: (1) there are several large "holes" in the sequence of maturities - e.g. the period 2030-2040 is largely vacant even though these would seem to excellent targets for bond ladders; (2) maturity dates are very "lumpy" i.e. relatively large numbers of issues mature on certain dates e.g. 2019, 2020 and 2042 whereas... Read more