Academy for fixed income investors
Deepen your understanding of bond investing.
Basics
TwentyFour
Fixed Income 101: Income investing
The goal of income investing is to ensure that your portfolio generates a steady source of revenue regardless of market conditions.
Fixed Income Boutique
Currencies
Learn more about currencies and how they depend on other factors in the economy.
TwentyFour
Bond yields and prices
Bond prices and yields move inversely to each other – as a bond’s price falls, its yield rises, and vice versa.
Bond yields and prices shift constantly in response to market forces: interest rate expectations, the credit quality of the issuer, and evolving supply and demand conditions.
TwentyFour
Bond duration
Duration is often said to measure a bond’s sensitivity to changes in interest rates, because it describes what is likely to happen to a bond’s price for a given change in the bond’s yield.
For fixed income investors, duration is a crucial metric for understanding how exposed your portfolio may be to changes in monetary policy.
Sub-asset classes
Fixed Income Boutique
Emerging market bonds: benefits and risks
Expand your knowledge on the sub-asset class of emerging market bonds.
TwentyFour
Everything you need to know about ABS
Asset-backed securities (ABS) are a type of bond, typically issued by banks or other lenders. What makes ABS different to conventional bonds, such as government or corporate bonds, is that they are ‘secured’ against a diversified pool of loans with similar characteristics.
TwentyFour
Everything you need to know about AT1s
Additional Tier 1 bonds (AT1s) are part of a family of bank capital securities known as contingent convertibles or ‘Cocos’. Convertible because they can be converted from bonds into equity (or written down entirely), and Contingent because that conversion only occurs if certain conditions are met, such as the issuing bank’s capital strength falling below a pre-determined trigger level.
TwentyFour
Everything you need to know about CLOs
Collateralised Loan Obligations, or CLOs, are bond instruments issued to fund a specific pool of loans, typically senior secured or ‘leveraged’ loans, to companies. The bonds are split into tranches that can carry different ratings (and yields) according to how senior they are in the CLO’s capital structure, normally from AAA notes at the top to equity notes at the bottom.
TwentyFour
Everything you need to know about corporate hybrids
Corporate hybrids are a type of bond issued by companies – they are known as hybrids because they combine certain features of debt and equity.
TwentyFour
Fixed Income 101: Inflation-linked bonds
Inflation is widely understood to be bad for bonds. Fundamentally, this is because inflation erodes the value of the coupon and principal payments that fixed rate bondholders receive in the future.
Fixed Income Boutique
Swiss bonds: low-risk, lucrative, robust
Switzerland offers quality not only to nature lovers, precision enthusiasts, and culinary connoisseurs, but also to bond investors who value reliability.
Portfolio management techniques
Fixed Income Boutique
3 exploitable sources of alpha
In this short video, you learn more about the sources, into which our experts in fixed income investments tap under different market conditions with the aim of generating alpha, the core of active management.
TwentyFour
Fixed Income 101: Comparing yields in different currencies
Fixed income managers always want to have the flexibility to look for the best value across their investment universe, and in our view they therefore need the capacity to buy bonds in different currencies.
TwentyFour
Fixed Income 101: Hedging currency risk
Hedging currency or foreign exchange (FX) risk is a key decision for any manager running a diversified fixed income portfolio. Currencies are inherently volatile, so whether and how FX risk is managed can have a material impact on a portfolio’s risk and return profile.
TwentyFour
Fixed Income 101: Roll-down
Roll-down is the capital gain created by the natural fall in a bond’s yield as it approaches maturity. As a fixed income investor, it is probably the most you will ever get paid for doing nothing.
TwentyFour
Fixed Income 101: Trading ABS and CLOs
Bids Wanted in Competition (or BWIC) lists are a unique characteristic of the ABS and CLO markets, where they are widely used in secondary trading when investors are looking to sell bonds.