Contents:
You can use the bond price formula to determine the value of a bond.
The issuer has to meet the interest and principal payments as they come due, or the bonds will go into default — something that can have devastating consequences for the issuer and, in the case of corporate bonds, its shareholders. When you calculate the price of a bond, you are determining the maximum price you would want to pay for the bond, based on how its coupon rate compares to the average rate most investors are currently receiving in the bond market.
Due to default risk , investors may require a higher rate of return than the prevailing risk-free rate. In general, the greater the default risk on a given bond issue, the higher the required rate of return. This bond-pricing formula can be tedious to calculate because you have to add the present value of each future coupon payment. We can combine the bond price formula and the annuity model to arrive at the following formula, which requires us to also include the present value of the par value reached at maturity:.
Our math shows that the bond is selling at a discount: The bond price is less than its par value because the required yield is greater than the coupon rate.
In order to attract investors, the bond has to sell at a discount. As a result, the present value of annuity formula is unnecessary. Instead, you calculate the present value of the par value at maturity. If they were sold at par, you would have no way to make money from them, and no incentive to buy them.
So far, our pricing calculations have assumed that we are buying bonds where the next coupon payment is one payment period away.
Each bond market has its own convention:. This method tallies the exact number of days until the next payment, and is mainly used for Treasuries. For example, assume you buy a semi-annual Treasury bond on April 1, and its next coupon payment is on July 1, The next coupon payment would be in 61 days:. We need to know how many days are in the six-month period of the regular payment cycle. This convention is used for munis and corporate bonds, and assumes that a year consists of days, and that each month has 30 days.
The fraction of the coupon payment that the bond seller earns for holding the bond between payments is called accrued interest. Since many bonds on the secondary market trade in between coupon payment dates, the bond seller has to be compensated for the portion of the coupon payment it earned for holding the bond since the last payment. This basically gives both the seller and buyer a pro-rated coupon payment for that period. The next coupon payment is expected on July 1. From our previous example, we know there are 90 days remaining. Now we can calculate the accrued interest using the following formula:.
Note that bonds are priced as clean or dirty, depending on whether accrued interest is included. Most bonds are quoted at clean prices and transacted at dirty prices, which include the accrued interest. Some bonds are issued with a provision that requires the issuer to repurchase a fixed percentage of the outstanding bonds each year, regardless of the level of interest rates. A sinking fund reduces the possibility of default ; default occurs when a bond issuer is unable to make promised payments in a timely manner.
Since a sinking fund reduces credit risk to bond holders, these bonds can be offered with a lower yield than an otherwise identical bond with no sinking fund.
Full fiat support. Since many bonds on the secondary market trade in between coupon payment dates, the bond seller has to be compensated for the portion of the coupon payment it earned for holding the bond since the last payment. Coupon rates are fixed, but yields are not. The yield to call is computed as follows: Treasury bills — the maturity is one year or less; the currently available maturities are 4 weeks, 13 weeks, 26 weeks and 52 weeks Treasury notes — the maturity ranges between 1 and 10 years; the currently available maturities are 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10 years Treasury bonds — the maturity ranges between 20 and 30 years; the currently available maturity is 30 years Another key difference between these securities is that Treasury bills are sold at a discount from their face value and redeemed at face value; Treasury notes and bonds are sold and redeemed at face value and pay semi-annual coupons to investors. A sinking fund reduces the possibility of default ; default occurs when a bond issuer is unable to make promised payments in a timely manner.
Bonds are issued by borrowers to raise funds for long-term investments; the main issuers of bonds in the U. Treasury securities are issued by the U. These are free of default risk , which is the risk that the investor will not receive all promised payments. They are not taxed by state and local governments, but are taxed at the federal level.
Another key difference between these securities is that Treasury bills are sold at a discount from their face value and redeemed at face value; Treasury notes and bonds are sold and redeemed at face value and pay semi-annual coupons to investors. Corporations can raise funds by issuing debt in the form of corporate bonds. These bonds offer a higher promised coupon rate than Treasuries, but expose investors to default risk.
The riskiest corporations offer the highest coupon rates to investors as compensation for default risk. A municipal bond is issued by a state or local government; as a result, they carry little or no default risk. Occasionally, municipalities do default on their debts; in , the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy as a result of being unable to pay its debts.
Municipal bonds offer an extremely favorable tax treatment to investors. They are not taxed by federal, state or local governments as long as the bond holder lives in the municipality in which the bonds were issued. As a result, municipal bonds can be issued with very low yields. Foreign bonds are issued by foreign governments and corporations and are denominated in dollars.
If they are denominated in a foreign currency, they are known as eurobonds. Dollar-denominated bonds issued in the U. This formula shows that the price of a bond is the present value of its promised cash flows. The bond makes annual coupon payments. These results also demonstrate that there is an inverse relationship between yields and bond prices:. For a bond that makes semi-annual coupon payments, the following adjustments must be made to the pricing formula:.
As an alternative to this pricing formula, a bond may be priced by treating the coupons as an annuity; the price is therefore equal to the present value of an annuity the coupons plus the present value of a sum the face value. This method of valuing bonds will use the formula: The bond in the previous example can be priced using this alternate bond valuation formula as follows:. A zero-coupon bond does not make any coupon payments; instead, it is sold to investors at a discount from face value.
The difference between the price paid for the bond and the face value, known as a capital gain , is the return to the investor.
The pricing formula for a zero coupon bond is:. What is the market price of this bond? In order to be consistent with coupon-bearing bonds, where coupons are typically made on a semi-annual basis, the yield will be divided by 2, and the number of periods will be multiplied by There are different types of yield measures that may be used to represent the approximate return to a bond.
These include:. This equals the rate of return earned by a bond holder known as the holding period return if:. It is impossible to solve for the yield to maturity algebraically; instead, this must be done using a financial calculator or Microsoft Excel. The variables in brackets fv, type and guess are optional values; the value of type is set to zero if it is not specified.
Guess can be used to provide an initial estimate of the rate, which could potentially speed up the calculation time. Note that either pv or fv must be negative, and the other must be positive. The negative value is considered to be a cash outflow, and the positive value is considered to be a cash inflow. Also note that entering semi-annual periods and coupon payments will produce a semi-annual yield; in order to convert this into an annual yield on a bond-equivalent basis , the semi-annual yield is doubled.
For a bond that is callable, the yield to call may be used as a measure of return instead of the yield to maturity. The process is similar to computing yield to maturity, except that the maturity date of the bond is replaced with the next call date. This is because yield to call is based on the assumption that the bond will be called on the next call date. The face value is replaced with the call price since this is the amount that the investor will receive if the bond is called.
What is the yield to call? In this case, the bond will mature in eight years, but it can be called in three years. The yield to call is computed as follows:. The current yield is simpler measure of the rate of return to a bond than the yield to maturity. The current yield is computed as:. This measure has the benefit of simplicity. It suffers from the drawback that it does not account for the time value of money.
Excel contains a set of specialized bond functions that can be used to account for several complications that arise in bond pricing, such as day-count conventions. Money market instruments e.