Last week we covered some of the basic characteristics and terminology of bonds. Understanding that a bond is simply a loan to be repaid at a stated interest rate over a fixed period of time lends a ...

When a government or corporation issues a bond, it does so with a specific par value and interest rate. Once in the market, those values don’t change; however, the value of a bond can change depending ...

Sooner or later, every serious investor confronts two important questions: 1) what are bonds and 2) how do they fit in my portfolio? The following discussion should help answer these questions, but I ...

When professional investors discuss the credit market, a term that often arises is duration, which is used to measure the sensitivity of a bond’s trading price to changes in interest rates ...

The second installment of our series on investment basics will focus on bonds. These securities a negotiable instruments, meaning that they may be bought and sold. Bonds are usually long-term debt ...

A municipal bond’s embedded call option allows the issuer of the bond to “call” (i.e., pay back) the debt at a date prior to the bond’s final maturity, which allows the issuer to reduce the cost of ...

If you’re an equity investor, you buy stocks at the current market price and hope they appreciate. For debt investors, it’s the opposite concept. Investors buy bonds based on their face value: the ...

The accrued market discount is the expected gain to be earned on a discount bond by holding it up until maturity, whereupon it should rise to its face value. This gives investors potential gains.

There are three types of bonds that afford financial protection in connection with a construction project: payment bonds, performance bonds, and bid bonds. Below is a primer on the differences between ...