This year is proving distinctive for the retail corporate bond market, though the market is not developing in a form that fosters access for small investors to the opportunities available to professional investors.Over the first seven months of 2012 there have been 12 bond issues aimed at retail investors that have sought to raise more than A$8 billion. Unfortunately, these securities are not high quality investment grade securities. The market is, for the most part, a high yield junk bond market. Subordinated debt and hybrid securities that offer investors bond-like returns and equity-like risks account for all of the issuance to date, except for less than A$0.5 billion of bonds issued by Heritage Bank and the Tatts Group.There are two reasons for this. One is that the issuers need retail investors to buy their junk bonds because most institutional investors won't touch them.The other reason is that financial planners will only push junk bonds to their retail clients because there is enough margin in the return on the bonds for them to take out a one per cent commission. The returns on lower yielding low risk bonds won't allow them to do this.  The issuers of the hybrid securities and the financial planners who sell them see retail investors as "stuffees". And retail investors encourage this view by looking only at the promised yield and buying the securities with their ears pinned back.The A$300 million Caltex note issue launched last Tuesday (and analysed in Banking Day last week) is the latest hybrid note to be sold to retail investors.This situation will continue until retail investors are confronted with the equity risk they are so enthusiastically embracing. Though, strangely, the confrontation with equity risk via the Paperlinx and Elders hybrids, among others, doesn't seem to have had much impact.