Course description
Bond Markets - Advanced
This two-day course develops delegates’ knowledge of the key areas of the bond markets – pricing, trading and investing - to an advanced level. The sessions are designed to be practical and interactive with the emphasis on gaining a detailed understanding of what drives bond markets and individual bond performance.
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Upcoming start dates
Suitability - Who should attend?
This course will be of benefit to those who already have some experience of bonds either through industry experience or prior study. A basic knowledge of bond maths is assumed, which can be gained by attending our Bond Markets – Introduction course. The course is particularly relevant for investment bankers, corporate financiers, corporate bankers, investment managers, analysts, brokers, investment advisers, as well as operations and support staff involved with the bond markets.
Outcome / Qualification etc.
Learning outcomes include obtaining a greater understanding of:
- Advanced bond maths
- Clean and dirty prices
- Accrued interest and main accrued conventions
- Case study - calculating bond prices and movements
- Cum div and ex div trading
- Calculating horizon yields
- The problem with yield-to-maturity
- Bootstrapping and disaggregating the yield curve
- The yield curve
- The par yield curve
- Yield curve theories
- Bond sensitivity
- Macauley and modified duration
- Case study - calculating the duration of a bond and the PVBP
- The primary market
- Government bonds – gifts and the auction process
- Corporate bonds - roadshow, placing and distribution
- Swaps
- Definition, main types and applications
- The importance of swaps to the bond market
- Case study - new issue swaps for EIB
- The secondary market
- Drivers of bond markets
- Impact of macro economic variables, monetary and fiscal policies and supply
- Examining market interest rate and inflation expectations
- The credit cycle and credit curves
- Credit analysis
- Rating methodology - the rating chain
- Case study - bond rating reviews
- Business risk, financial risk and liquidity, control and event risk
- Asset backed securities
- ABS structures
- MBS and CDO
- Bond selection
- The importance of structure and structural subordination
- Seniority, priority on liquidation and the payment waterfall
- Bond trading and investing
- Passive bond techniques – immunisation, dedication, the role of STRIPS
- Active techniques – beating a bond benchmark, duration adjusted switches
- Using bond futures – speculating, hedging and arbitrage
- Case study - hedging a eurobond with futures
- Credit derivatives – credit default swaps and total return swaps
- Case study - overview of pricing and hedging a credit default swap (CDS)
- Convertible bonds overview – uses and determinants of pricing
- Repo
- Structure and terminology
- Users of repos and main determinants of pricing
- Linking bonds with the cost of liquidity
- Recent developments in the bond markets
- Quantitative easing
- Conventional versus inflation-linked bonds