Bond and Curve Essay Example for Free

Bond and Curve Essay The first tool that we want to use to look at news, news for fixed income. So what we’ll do is we’ll navigate down to the bottom of the menu, and we’ll click on 14 NBOND for bond news. Clicking that, it’ll load a very familiar page for you. This is the news categories. And you’ll notice on the top left in the toolbar it says bonds. So now we have our top bond news. This isn’t just our top bond news, but also we can choose popular news, and we can also see all news for bonds. You can customize the type of fixed income news by either clicking on customize and choosing from there, or if you click new search you can also type in additional fixed income topics like credit markets, municipal bonds, additional categories that I already have in my particular monitor here. Now for the next screen that we would like to look at is economic calendar. This is another screen that you should be familiar with already from the other videos, but let’s type in ECO for economic calendar. And from here, specifically for fixed income, we can focus on releases within the top left menu. If we click the economic releases and go down to government auctions, this is going to bring up the auctions for the United States in particular. You can change the country. If you want to put in Germany, you can type in Germany. And notice if we go back to the United States, all the current releases are in white and all the future releases are going to be in amber, just like before. If you want to see the results of those, you can again click into that release and you can see that data in there as well the news stories listed below. Now for an overview of the global fixed income markets, we can type WB for world bond markets, and then hit the go key. Notice that we have our countries on the left hand side, and across from those we have columns for information like price, the change in price, yield, change in yield, a charge of the yield. And then on the right side, we have a relative value performance of how do we look – how is the yield now versus the average over a period? In this case, we’re comparing the yield of now in blue versus the average, which is in three months. You can change that easily by clicking one week, for example, and now you can see if the yield is wider or tighter than the average that you specified on the top right. In addition, you can change the maturity of the bonds. If you want to look at five years, change it to five years and that’ll update – that’ll update accordingly. It’ll show you the individual securities here. If you want to see any additional information from those, you can actually click on the name of the country, and that’ll take you into a deeper level menu where now you can see the different tenors of that curve. You can see the curve spreads, butterflies, additional information there that you can explore. Let’s hit the menu key. We also have two additional tabs. If you click on spreads, that’ll give you spreads relative to the country you have selected. If you want to see spreads relative to Italy, we can choose Italy from the list. And now it’s giving you the spread of Italy versus the United States in blue. Additionally, you have the spread chart and the historical comparison available just like in the bonds tab. Lastly, we have the curves tab. And what that’s doing is it’s letting you compare all these countries with a side by side of each point on that curve so you can get a quick and real-time update of those curves and how they’re moving. Now WB is a monitor with real-time information that rates (ph) currently trading in the market. For an overview of bond yield forecasts, we can look at BYFC and hit go. Now BYFC will give you bond yield forecasts for multiple points on the curve, as well as three-month benchmark rates, as well as tenor spreads that you can specify up on the top right. You can narrow down the countries or focus on the countries based on your region on the top. And going back to let’s say the United States, BYFC has six quarters worth of forecasts. And these forecasts are contributed to us by economists and market researchers on a monthly basis by our Bloomberg monthly news surveys. When you click into the particular bond tenor, it’ll mention who forecasts, as well as the statistical information that corresponds with those surveys and when they were received. For a real-time monitor of benchmark rates, you can use BTMM. BTMM is our treasury and money markets monitor. This can be specified by country. You can change your country on the top left and then navigate based on the region and choose the country directly from there. Now we have rates from – deposit rates, all of our benchmark rates. It also includes treasury rates on the left side, as well as even the gold spot rate and equity index futures. This is a great way for market players and for you to get a pulse in real time what the rates are as they change in the market. To conduct curve comparison, to look at a curve for a particular country, to look at their CDS curve, rate curve, we can look at all those by typing CRVFgo for curve finder. Within the curve finder, along the top the tabs will show you what types of curves we have available. Within those, we can navigate by country. We can also look on the far side and see based on those countries what we have available. Now in our example, let’s search for the A US corporate curve. If we go to credit and then we look at industrial, we can then select the A. And we wanted to see this in US dollars, so we can click on US industrials A BVAL curve. Now that we have selected that curve, we can go to the bottom right and click show selected curves. Now we can see the curve for the US industrial A curve where we have the one-year through 30-year rate. These are the yields of the curve, and we also have some additional curves on the far right that I’ve added in the past. But right now we’re only seeing the industrial A curve. We have the yields down here on the bottom, and if we want to see this as of a historical date, then we can see how did that curve look one week ago. If we click on the one W at the top, now we can see the current curve versus the curve of one week ago, and then the spread between those two. If we want to enter a custom date instead, we can enter those dates here by clicking, and then we can put in the dates on the top. Now if we want to specify a custom date, we can go to the more tab. Then once we select, we can drop the custom date and then enter, let’s say, March 9, 2012. When we click update, now our curve will show March 9, 2012, along with the other dates there. If we want to add another curve and see how does this industrial curve compare to, maybe we could use the US swap curve here, we can just check that curve. And now you’ll see the other curve is in a different color and you can see them charted against each other. You can always unselect – you can always remove those curves as you like. If you want to add a curve that’s specific, you can click to browse, and then use that same menu and navigation to go to your next curve. The last thing I want to show you with the curve is to click menu to go back. And we can see these data points numerically in a table if we scroll our mouse or hit the page forward key on our keyboard, which is the green key next to our menu key that you used before. Now you can see for each curve what that historical date was in the table. All the applications we’ve discussed today have all been market monitors and broad-level overview. Now let’s move into actually finding a screen for securities. Then we’ll close with looking at individual security applications. Now, to start, the easiest application that we have to do a security find is to actually use SECF, go. SECF is our security finder. And what that allows you to do is to browse Bloomberg’s universe of securities and statistics. Now the security finder is really in two sections. The top is our control area, which allows you to look at the individual tabs by asset class, as well as the search tool at the very top left. The second half is really the output section, the section that’s going to show you the results in a table, and then it’ll let you search by relevancy. Now let’s say that we have an example where we want to search for a bond from IBM. We can click on 32FI, and then notice that we have always additional buttons across the bottom. Now we have this for corporates, but in addition, if you happen to look for bond futures, interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, loans, those are available there too. For IBM, we’ll stay on corporate. And then in the issuer name, we can type in IBM for International Business Machines. Alternatively, you could also type in IBM as the ticker since that’s the actual corporate ticker for IBM. Here we can actually look through the list and search what coupon we were looking for. We can do that, or we can actually narrow it out and type in 7.5 and – if that’s the coupon we’re looking for – and then it’ll show it right there. It’ll give us brief statistics in that list. And then when you’re ready to actually load that security for analysis, then you can actually click on that security and it’ll launch that for you. Now if you would rather use the search box instead of narrowing it down through these filters, you can clear that from the list. And then in the top where it says search, you can type IBM. We were looking at the 7.5 percent coupon. When we hit go, then again it’ll show us our result here. If you wish to do a more sophisticated search, you can definitely do that within Bloomberg. In order to do that search, you would type SRCH and then hit go. Within SRCH, you can do an advanced search for corporates and government bonds. To do so, start out with clicking on the top red – top right red advanced search button. Now you’ll see your difference choices on the left for your filtering. If you wish to specify an issue date or a maturity date, you can go into issuance information 2, click there, and then you can enter that information here. Additionally, covenants. You can definitely select any one of these check boxes. You can just definitely notice these gray tabs as you scroll across the top. This is where you’re going to get your additional information. You can narrow it down by credit ratings and choose. Let’s say you want to use SP ratings and you want to include only investment grade in your search. Now you can either individually select, or you can click investment grade and then click update. You can also – if you want to specify a particular range of yields or a particular price range, you can click 7, inventory and analytical data. And then down here in the middle you can specify your prices or your yields. We’ll make our search very broad and we’ll put in 1 to 10 percent, and then click update. This is – this is not the exhaustive list. You can click any one of these. And you’ll notice that we also again have additional tabs here if you want to sort by sector. The list goes on. Now let’s click 1 go. The way to see your search results is to click 1, go to search. Notice that we have over 30,000 results. We’ll only see 5,000 of those results in this screen. In addition, if you were to export this to Excel, which you can definitely do, that will also be limited to a maximum of 5,000 results, just as – as a note for that. You can also save this search. If this is a search that you need to run again, then you can go to options, save search, and then you can come back to this search in the future and rerun it. And in the future, you may have – you’ll have the opportunity to have those different results. Now let’s – let’s look at screens that pertain to individual securities. Before we were looking at a bond with a 7.5 percent coupon from IBM. We can type IBM at the top, and then 7.5. Notice that our auto complete helps find that security. So you can use SECF that we discussed before, or you can use auto complete to type in your security if you have the – the information here, like we do. You can that to select your security, or you can also type it in as your CUSIP (ph) or other identifier there and it’ll help find it for you. We’ll click it from that list, and that automatically loads the security for us. You’ll notice that we have this menu of applications that we can run. And we won’t have time to discuss these today, but definitely explore these for your analytics for relative value hedging, things that you can look forward to in the future. The particular screen that we’re looking for right now is the description page. So click on 16 DES on the top right. Now notice on the description page we have the core information, including issuer, the type of issuer it is, the sector that they’re in. We have the coupon – coupon frequency, core information about that security. On the left side, we have navigation. We can look at information such as covenants. We can look at bond ratings. If you want to see historical bond ratings for this issuer, then you can actually click on the expansion tabs to see those right in the screen. In addition to that, you can also see if there’s multiple coupons or if there’s a schedule, if it’s callable or puttable, things like that. You can click into schedules. It’s grayed out if it’s not available. In addition to the information that we have in the bond description, we also have a tab for issuer-level information. Let’s click on 22 issuer description. And particularly, we can look at 4 debt summary to look at their distribution. Now here we have nice charts and breakdowns, but note that in these individual tabs on the left we can also launch the individual applications directly by clicking on them. If we expand this window, now we can see the full application for our debt distribution. And here we can see IBM, and then we can also see the companies that are part of that business where we can see the issuer and subsidiaries. As we scroll down, we can see that entire list. One additional note is that you can also group your debt distribution by whether it’s just the issuer – only obligations of the current issuer. You can narrow down that debt based on its group. Let’s close that. Notice that we have more than just the debt distribution. We also have major creditors who own that bond, credit health as in financial ratios to give you a better perspective on not just that particular issue, but also that issuer. Now, to move from core information – core descriptive information to actual analytics to run yield analysis on this particular security, we can type YA and hit go for yield analysis. On this page, you can see that we have additional tabs, one for yield and spread. We can then move to pricing to see descriptive information. But let’s stay on the yield and spread tab just for a moment. The yield and spread analysis screen will let you price a fixed income security, calculate risk, hedge amounts, and see market data. You can input custom spreads. So in this case it’s the spread to bench, and it’ll reprice your security based on your input. So here we put a spread to bench of 20 basis points and it recalculated our price and yield. In addition, we can change how we calculate our yield if it’s yield to worse (ph), or yield to maturity, or yield to a custom date. We can also enter in historical dates in our historical settle (ph), and you just type that in here. We have our spreads. You won’t need to know – if you’re not familiar with these types of spreads, if you hover your mouse over them, it’ll give you a brief description of what those are. On the right side, we have our risk measures, risk and convexity. We have our risk hedge. These are against the benchmark that you select here. And then also, it calculates our accrued interest and all-in price. We can move across the tabs along the top, and now we can pricing. Pricing based on what’s available on the market from the trace reporting, from our runs messages, things like that, descriptive information or snapshots from what we had on the description page that we looked at just prior to this screen. We have relative value graphs to see not just what it is today, but how that’s changed over time. And then custom gives you full customization of what type of information you want to see on each page. You can click into any one of these tabs to then launch that individual analysis within that section of the screen. If you like this custom tab or any of these tabs, you can change the order by dropping it across, and then it’ll set that way for you going forward. The final screen we’d like to discuss today is a credit monitor that you can type GCDS. Notice again we used auto complete. We can select it here or hit go. And what GCDS does is it shows you credit default swap spreads based on the sectors that you choose.gcds You can set it by region. You can import a portfolio or – based on an equity index, a launch pad monitor. It gives you a very wide range of sources to pull that from, as well as the full customization of what spreads you wish to see. In my setup here, we can look at it by region. We have it set up for the Americas, although we can set it for global. Here I have listed for banks, but we can choose by any sector listed in this drop menu. We can choose to sort out whether we want to see investment grade or high yield. And then we can choose which tenor of the CDS curve we wish to view. And lastly, we can choose which pricing source we want to narrow that down by. We can choose CMA New York, for example, or we can also use a Bloomberg composite price here, which is what we’ll use going forward here. Now, on the right-hand column are all securities or all the issuers where we have CDS pricing based on our selections up here. If we choose to check off the box, then it’ll add that – that name to that chart, and you’ll notice it’s added that in the legend if it’s available. We also can see the average spread for all 35, or we can do – we can click on average of selected ancd then see that charted. So we can say which names are above the average, which names are below the average. To conclude that example, notice that our highest spread on the chart is currently Morgan Stanley. Notice that on the legend it highlights the name. That is currently trading above the average, which is 201. Notice that if I put my cursor on the actual – the average of selected, then it also highlights which line that is. The average is at 201. So GCS is a great tool to not just narrow out the individual names that you want to chart on a graph, but also let’s you easily compare those not just against each other but also against as a group average. And just as a note, if you never get your mouse to the very top right hand corner, you can see that there’s an icon with a green arrow. You can click on this green arrow and drag that into Excel, and that’ll move the information from the screen into Excel for you. This concludes are session on fixed income essentials. If you need any future assistance, please feel free to hit the help key twice for immediate assistance from our 24/7 global help desk.