Is it safe to play it safe?

The future has yet to come but you have a right to shape it. We test empirical data on European IRS market to check the truthfulness of this sentence. Comparing expectation on future interest rates implicit in IRS contracts with realizations of Euribor, we argue whether the financial market provides a safe strategy to investors choosing fixed long-term interest rates against floating ones. The development of European financial market has reached a point that allows some preliminary empirical analysis. Time series are long enough to draw some conclusion, although some exogenous shocks that has afflicted the last decades suggest that more data are needed for a deeper quantitative analysis. Yet, the paper provides support to traders hedging their positions on fixed-income markets.