Risk exposure with Bonds: the Duration

What the hell is the “Duration”??

The Duration tells you how long, in years, it takes for the coupons to repay the price of a bond. It is the weighted average maturity of a bond’s cash flows or of any series of linked cash flows. The Macauley formula that gives a way to calculate the Duration goes like this:

Why is it important?

It is an important factor to know as it gives you a way to quantify the risk you bear in investing in bonds. Long term bonds have a higher Duration than short term bonds.

Triming your data in Excel

Everyday I am a bit more happy with this blog. The WordPress team did a great job as it is reliable and it’s bundled with useful features. You’re going to ask me: what’s the link between WordPress and Excel?

Well: Thanks to WordPress I know what you are looking when you use the search engine in the top right corner.

Even though this won’t be enough for me to take on Google and Yahoo this is more than enough to know that some of you have problems manipulating text fields in Excel. Apparently you are looking for a “Between” function in excel to get info from a cell.

Key Performance Indicator using REPT()

Hi,

I recently wanted to display some information in a table using conditional formatting for ease of reading.
I eventually ended up using the function rept().

It looked just like that:

Dynamic dashboards in Excel

Not exactly a function. More a feature here…
We are going to learn how to do this:

So: What’s so impressive about this?

Building a series of open business days

In a previous article we have been using the function networkdays() to know how many business days there were between two dates. Now we will examine how to build a series of business days in Excel.

Here we are interested in building a series of 21 business days starting on the 6th of August using a very handy function that comes with Excel.