Chapter 6
Bond Fundamentals*
Risk management starts with the pricing of assets. The simplest assets to study are regular, fixed-coupon bonds. Because their cash flows are predetermined, we can translate their stream of cash flows into a present value by discounting at a fixed interest rate. Thus the valuation of bonds involves understanding compounded interest and discounting, as well as the relationship between present values and interest rates.
Risk management goes one step further than pricing, however. It examines potential changes in the price of assets as the interest rate changes. In this chapter, we assume that there is a single interest rate, or yield, that is used to price the bond. This will be our fundamental risk factor. This chapter describes the relationship between bond prices and yields and presents indispensable tools for the management of fixed-income portfolios.
This chapter starts our coverage of financial markets by discussing bond fundamentals. Section 6.1 reviews the concepts of discounting, present values, and future values. These concepts are fundamental to understand the valuation of financial assets. Section 6.2 then plunges into the price-yield relationship. It shows how the Taylor expansion rule can be used to relate movements in bond prices to those in yields. This Taylor expansion rule, however, covers much more than bonds. It is a building block of risk measurement methods based on local valuation, as we shall see later. Section 6.3 applies this ...
