In November, I read a book that’s stuck with me. Dangerous Dreamers was a historical recounting of the events that set the stage for the junk-bond and LBO explosion in the 1980s. I was intrigued by how an obscure book and an insight that fast-growing companies couldn’t borrow money in the bond markets at the time sparked Michael Milken’s idea to create (and control) the market for high-yield—junk—bonds.

Ever since then, I’ve been interested in learning more about bonds of publicly traded companies (and governments) and the public market for them. I’ve bought several books and started tracking down people who work in these markets to talk with. Lots to learn, but I think it’ll be a fun multiyear project. I suspect it will complement what I’ve learned from analyzing and investing in public stocks.

Today I read an article (see here) that made me want to begin this project sooner rather than later. It was reported that Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is thinking about issuing a 100-year bond. From what I can gather, a bond with a 100-year duration is very rare and hasn’t been issued by a technology company since 1997 or so.

Reading that article highlighted that I don’t know what I don’t know about the bond market, and it made me more curious and more eager to fill my knowledge gaps. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out time soon to start reading my new bond books.