TreasuryDirect: Where did my order go??

I checked late in the afternoon today and my order in my new account with TreasuryDirect to buy $1,000 of 28-day T-bills had been marked as "Purchase Request Edited". Then this evening I looked again and the order had completely disappeared without a trace and there was no sign of any purchased T-bills either. The system was very slow, so it's possible that there was simply a computer database or communications "glitch". I'll know more tomorrow.

What I do know for sure is that if my pruchase order did go through, I didn't get a vey good deal. I checked the official Auction results and the discount rate was a measly 4.735%, less than what PayPal pays and way below the current Fed funds target interest rate of 5.25%. Even classic 3-month T-bills went for a lousy discount rate of 4.955%. And a 6-month T-bill gets only 5.09%. What this says is that there is incredible demand for this "paper". People can wring their hands all they want about the Federal budget deficit, but the simple fact is that the market is clamoring for a lot more of it.

I hope my order really did get cancelled for some reason (and I'll shift the cash to PayPal), but if it did go through I can certainly live with that 4.735 annual return for one month.

. . .

STOP THE PRESSES!

After writing that preceding story, I looked around some more and found a link for "Pending Transactions" and, sure enough, it shows my order with a confirmation code and issue date (Thursday), so it looks like I will get stuck with this "dog" for four weeks. Treasury will debit my bank checking account for $996.31722 ($996.32??) sometime soon and then credit that same acount with $1,000 on August 3. I'll earn a whopping $3.68 for that month, but that is more than I'm earning in my Siebert and ShareBuilder taxable accounts, but less than what my Roth and PayPal accounts are earning.

But all of this is in the name of an experiment, and it may make sense to keep a chunk of my cash in Treasuries of some form anyway.

-- Jack Krupansky