Should you own bonds in your portfolio? The easy answer is “yes,” but the tricky interplay between low yields in traditional fixed income and the prospects for higher interest rates—which will likely hurt bond prices—has made many investors wary of the space.

The two-day Inside Fixed Income conference slated for November 2-3 in Newport Beach, Calif., will attempt to answer some of the existential questions concerning fixed income in client portfolios.

“It’s a bond ETF conference, and ETFs have become the dominant way to express sector and segment opinion in the bond space,” says Matt Hougan, CEO at Inside ETFs, a division of Informa PLC, which is hosting the event. “The conference will tackle big picture things in the bond space like should you own bonds at all, given where we are in the interest rate cycle. We’ll also discuss topics such as the inflation outlook at the Fed, or whether emerging-market debt belongs in every portfolio.”

Fixed income still occupies a small part of the ETF universe, but it’s growing. “Fixed-income ETF are just now coming into their own,” Hougan says, noting that they held about $550 billion out of the total $3 trillion U.S. ETF market as of the end of August. That’s less than one-fifth of total ETF assets in the U.S., but it's up from effectively zero percent just a handful of years ago. There were more than $90 billion in new flows into fixed-income ETFs year-to-date through August.

The Inside Fixed Income conference is small, with attendance generally falling between 200 and 300 people—or roughly 10 times smaller than the Inside ETFs conference that takes place in Florida each January. But that allows for more a more intimate setting, so to speak. Where the Inside ETFs show is dominated by the financial advisor market, Hougan says, Inside Fixed Income is more mixed with institutions having a greater presence with the likes of pension funds, endowments and insurance companies.

Featured speakers at Inside Fixed Income will be Jim Grant, founder and editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer; Jeffrey Sherman, deputy chief investment officer at DoubleLine; Dennis Gartman, editor and publisher of The Gartman Letter; and Bob Smith, president and chief investment officer of Sage Advisory Services, a well-respected fixed-income model portfolio shop.