Meaning in context: through yield, return 15%, etc

Question

“Fundamentals matter less in an environment like this,” said Orlando Green, a fixed-income strategist at Credit Agricole SA’s corporate and investment banking unit in London. “It’s very much driven by circumstance. Investors are looking for where they can pick up a little extra return through yield. You’ve seen that with Portugal having rallied despite everything that’s been going on.”

French 10-year yields slid seven basis points, or 0.07 percentage point, this week to 1.57 percent at the 5 p.m. close in London. They dropped to 1.562 percent today, the least since Bloomberg began collecting the data in 1990. The 1.75 percent security due November 2024 rose 0.63, or 6.30 euros per 1,000-euro ($1,351) face amount, to 101.66. The rate was little changed today.
...
The benchmark German 10-year yield declined five basis points in the week to 1.16 percent, ending the trading day yesterday at a record-low 1.15 percent. The rate on similar- maturity Portuguese debt fell 20 basis points, the biggest weekly drop since the five days through April 18.

Portuguese government securities returned 15 percent this year through yesterday, the best-performing euro-area sovereign debt market after Greece, according to Bloomberg World Bond Indexes. Their French peers gained 6.8 percent and Germany’s rose 5.5 percent.

-- French Yields Fall to Records With Bunds’ on Ukraine Safety Bid Link

How do I understand through yield?

And the second bold sentence sounds a bit weird to me. How could the security rise 0.63 to 101.66? Does it mean the original price of the security with the yield of 1.75% was 101.03 euros and rose 0.63 euro per face value of 100 euros?

Does the returned here mean yielded a return of 15% or prices rebounded by 15%?

Answer 1

Investors are looking for where they can pick up a little extra return through yield.

Read through as via or by way of. Yield refers to the percentage of gain made on principal when purchasing bonds. This is talking about the current behavior of fixed income investors: they're looking to buy bonds which give higher rates of return, even at the cost of increased risk or lowered stability (fundamentals matter less in an environment like this). They buy bonds because stocks are much more volatile and riskier; bonds offer a "guaranteed" rate of return. Because the investors are on a fixed income, they want safer plays, preferring security over the possibility of large profits.

And the second bold sentence sounds a bit weird to me. How could the security rise 0.63 to 101.66? Does it mean the original price of the security with the yield of 1.75% was 101.03 euros and rose 0.63 euro per face value of 100 euros?

The second bolded sentence means that the price of the 1.75% security has effectively gone up, though the pricing scheme is quite complicated. 101.66 is above the par value (which is 100) of the security. This means that the 1.75% item is trading at a premium, because it's priced over its par value, and is now 0.63 units more expensive than it was previously. Generally speaking, when interest rates fall, as mentioned at the start of the paragraph, bond prices rise.

Portuguese government securities returned 15 percent this year through yesterday
Does the returned here mean yielded a return of 15% or prices rebounded by 15%?

It means they yielded a return of 15% over the past year, as calculated by Bloomberg. Talk of an investment's return is almost always referring to the yield, profit, etc.; we generally don't use return to speak of price increases in terms of percentages. Rebound or rise are the words of choice for that situation. If rising to a previously held price level is meant, you can expect an explicit mention of pricing to follow return; e.g. a return to a price of X.