Plotting the investment grade spread

Aside from the risk-free rate changing through time, another determinant of the corporate bond yield is the size of the credit spread, which also changes through time. One way to observe this spread is to compare the yield on the highest rated investment grade bonds (Aaa rating) and the yield on the lowest investment grade bonds (Baa rating).

The investment grade (IG) spread can be viewed as the market's perception of how risky investing in bonds is at a certain point in time. The larger the IG spread, the more compensation investors demand for investing in riskier bonds.

In this exercise, you will plot the investment grade (IG) spread from January 2006 to September 2016. The object spread contains the Aaa and Baa yields (generated using the quantmod package).

This exercise is part of the course

Bond Valuation and Analysis in R

Exercise instructions

Examine the first and last six elements of spread using calls to head() and tail().
Generate a diff column within spread that is equal to the difference between Baa yields (baa) and Aaa yield (aaa), converted to percentage points (* 100).
Use plot() to view spread over time. Set the x argument equal to spread$date and set the y argument equal to spread$diff.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Examine first and last six elements in spread
head(___)
tail(___)

# Calculate spread$diff
spread$diff <-

# Plot spread
plot(x = ___,
     y = ___,
     type = "l",
     xlab = "Date",
     ylab = "Spread (bps)",
     col = "red",
     main = "Baa - Aaa Spread")

Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

Bond Valuation and Analysis in R

IntermediateSkill Level

5.0+

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The fixed income market is large and filled with complex instruments. In this course, we focus on plain vanilla bonds to build solid fundamentals you will need to tackle more complex fixed income instruments. In this chapter, we demonstrate the mechanics of valuing bonds by focusing on an annual coupon, fixed rate, fixed maturity, and option-free bond.

Exercise 1: Introduction Exercise 2: Price vs. value Exercise 3: Time value of money Exercise 4: Computing a bond's future value Exercise 5: Computing a bond's present value Exercise 6: Bond valuation Exercise 7: Laying out the bond's cash flows Exercise 8: Discounting bond cash flows with a known yield Exercise 9: Convert your code into a function Exercise 10: Convert your code into a bond valuation function

Estimating Yield To Maturity - The YTM measures the expected return to bond investors if they hold the bond until maturity. This number summarizes the compensation investors demand for the risk they are bearing by investing in a particular bond. We will discuss how one can estimate YTM of a bond.

Exercise 1: Price-yield relationship Exercise 2: Credit ratings Exercise 3: The yield on the Moody's Baa index Exercise 4: Value the 5% bond using the Baa yield you found Exercise 5: Plotting the price/yield relationship Exercise 6: Components of yield Exercise 7: Risk-free yield Exercise 8: Plotting US Treasury yields Exercise 9: Plotting the investment grade spread

Current Exercise

Exercise 10: Estimating the yield of a bond Exercise 11: Finding a bond's yield Exercise 12: Use uniroot function to find YTM

Interest rate risk is the biggest risk that bond investors face. When interest rates rise, bond prices fall. Because of this, much attention is paid to how sensitive a particular bond's price is to changes in interest rates. In this chapter, we start the discussion with a simple measure of bond price volatility - the Price Value of a Basis Point. Then, we discuss duration and convexity, which are two common measures that are used to manage interest rate risk.

Exercise 1: Bond price volatility and the price value of a basis point Exercise 2: Price value of a basis point Exercise 3: Calculate PV01 of a 10% bond Exercise 4: Duration Exercise 5: Duration of a zero-coupon bond Exercise 6: Calculate approximate duration for a bond Exercise 7: Estimating effect on bond price using duration Exercise 8: Convexity Exercise 9: Calculate approximate convexity for a bond Exercise 10: Estimating effect of convexity on bond price Exercise 11: Estimating the bond price using duration and convexity

We will put all of the techniques that the student has learned from Chapters One through Three into one comprehensive example. The student will be asked to value a bond by using the yield on a comparable bond and estimate the bond's duration and convexity.

Exercise 1: Summarizing the main lessons Exercise 2: Find AAA bond yields as of September 30, 2016 Exercise 3: Bond valuation Exercise 4: Alternative cash flow vector code Exercise 5: Duration and convexity Exercise 6: Direction of price change Exercise 7: Calculate duration Exercise 8: Calculate convexity measure Exercise 9: The estimated price change using duration and convexity Exercise 10: Congratulations!