Bonds Table
Description
Welcome to the bond market! Here, you can access all available bonds for purchase, as well as selling any of the ones you currently hold. In Finance Interactive, there are both government bonds and corporate bonds. The former are always issued by the Government entity, while corporate bonds are issued by the corresponding company that wishes to raise debt money from capital markets.
Each row represents an individual bond issuance by either the government or a corporation. Each row contains the following data:
- Initial Maturity (Years): The time, in years, from bond issuance to its maturity date.
- Months to maturity: The number of months on which a bond’s principal is repaid and interest payments cease.
- Issuing entity: Either the government or a corporation.
- Available to public: The amount (in face value terms) of bonds that are available to purchase.
- Credit rating: The credit rating of the issuer entity.
- Coupon rate: The annual rate of coupon payment relative to its face value. For example, a coupon rate of 5% over a $100M in face value amounts to $5M of coupon payments per year. Depending on the issuer, it is split into 2 or 4 payments (twice a year or quarterly).
- Yield: The annual return on a bond (see the Bond page for details about how it is computed).
- Price: The price of each individual bond. All bonds in this game have a face value of $10,000 and it is the initial price. This means that if a company issues $10M in bonds, it has to issue 1,000 bonds.
- Owned: The amount of individual bonds held by you.
- Unrealized profit (loss): Computed as the difference between the current market value of the bonds you hold and the cost basis of the investment.
- Buy button: Click on this button to buy the selected type of bond. Use the slider or the input field to select the amount of face value to buy in millions. You will also get the actual cost of buying the bonds.
- Sell button: Click on this button to sell the selected type of bond. Use the slider or the input field to select the amount of face value to sell in millions. You will also get the actual cost of selling the bonds.
By clicking on the headers of the table, you can also sort the tables either ascending or descending.
For filtering the table, you can use either the search bar (which filters by the issuing entity) or the filter button. The latter has the following filtering options:
- Initial maturity (years): Between min and max years.
- Months to maturity: Between min and max months.
- Only junk bonds: Use this to select only bonds with credit rating BB or worse.
- Only investment grade bonds: Use this to select only bonds with credit rating BBB or better.
- Issuing amount ($M): Between min and max millions.
- Credit rating: Select one or more credit ratings you want to filter.
- Coupon rate (%): Between min% and max%.
- Yield (%): Between min% and max%.
- Price: Between min and max.
- Own bonds: selects only bonds you own.
- Available to the public ($M): Between min and max millions.
For filtering parameters between min and max, by leaving min empty, you select all rows whose value is less or equal than max. Similarly, by leaving max empty, you select all rows whose value is larger or equal than min (leaving both empty is equal to having no filter at all).
Click confirm to filter the table or cancel to cancel the filtering. Also, you can click the Clear all button to reset all filter parameters (still, you need to click confirm to remove the filters!).
Strategy tips
- As a rule of thumb, the longer the time to maturity of a bond, the wilder the price fluctuations will be. So, you may find really cheap chunk bonds if the maturity is long enough. If the company's credit rating recovers, you can make a solid profit (or lose all your investment...)
- The riskier the bond (in credit rating terms), the more capital you will need to comply with insurance regulations. See the Minimum Capital Required page for details.