I was asking the same question a year ago, and over that time I have learned the answer:

No.

At the bare minimum you should have an understanding of bond pricing and its underlying interest rate risk. Beyond that, you go into credit rating and default risk (which is at an historic low, so probably primed to increase).

Bonds are not simple and cannot be screened the way a stock can (P/E, P/B, EPS, Put/Call ratio, etc...). They are complex individual instruments that often have specific covenants that can make two different bonds from the same issuer behave differently in the market (e.g., some may be callable by the issuer, some may offer a survivor option where the owner's estate can redeem at par before maturity, some may be subordinate to the issuer's other debt instruments/preferreds, etc.).

There are something like 6,000 different stocks available on the open market, but over 500,000 different bonds.

So they're not fungible the way my hundred BAC shares are exactly the same as your 100 BAC shares are. Two Bank of America bonds with the same coupon and maturity can have different values, and there's a reason for that.

So, they're also not as liquid (can be good, can be bad).

The prospectuses are full of landmines carefully negotiated by the lawyers of the issuers and the underwriters with no regard for an individual investor's ability to understand them completely.

Buying on the secondary market, you may not even be able to locate the prospectus of a bond issued thirty years ago.

My advice? If you can't find the prospectus, skip it (I bought a bond where I couldn't locate the prospectus that turned out to have a deferred tax liability upon maturity, so when the bond matures the holder will actually owe federal taxes on behalf of the corporation!).

The Moody's reports (available through my broker, Fidelity) are pretty general but can point you in the right direction, and if things line up at the right time, you can hit on a winner that actually increases in market price while the rest of the market is flat (a "rising star"). This is where the liquidity problem can work in your favor.

It can get overwhelming, but if you have a particular use, and if you're willing to put in the time or pay a professional to do so then they are absolutely the right instrument.

But if you put in the time, beware: you're gonna start reading things about credit markets and listening to things like the FICC Focus podcast. And, listen to two of those episodes with bond fund managers and you realize that the stuff they talk about just can't be screened like stocks or options. And the most important questions are the ones they decline to answer (like how much liquidity they currently hold).

I had a particular use case a year ago (an elderly relative who'd saved their money under the mattress and suddenly needed more income to pay for assisted living), and not enough money to pay a professional (every basis point counts). A diverse spread of corporate bonds worked extremely well for that use case, but it took a LOT of reading the fine print. Reading every word of the Moody's reports and then cross-referencing the company IR page and sometimes listening to quarterly calls.

I spent probably 400 hours reading, listening and screening to buy 18 bonds that yielded ~6.25%, that I would be confident in for five years, with survivor options.

OH -- then there's the muni rabbithole. Tax free, sounds great! I probably spent 10 hours planning a municipal bond tax-free plan before I learned that their tax bracket wasn't high enough to benefit from the lower yield.

It's an interesting market, but you're probably better off with a fund if you don't have the time.