About

Bonds are called the safe part of a portfolio, and a US Treasury will pay you back. What it won’t do is hold its price when interest rates rise. In 2023 that gap closed a bank: Silicon Valley Bank owned safe bonds bought at the bottom of rates, and its depositors wanted their money back at the top.

This course is a game about that gap. Each chapter is a short beat on a bank’s treasury desk, a few cards that explain one idea with real numbers, and a handful of puzzles: price a bond, work out its duration, read the spread, read the curve, then hedge the next bank’s book with a swap. The yield curves and Fed rates are real. The banks are fictional, and nothing here is advice.

It’s made by the same person as balancesheet.art. If something is confusing or you have an idea, the Feedback link at the bottom of every page comes straight to me. I read all of it.