CHAPTER 5.1 – MEASURING RETURNS OVER DIFFERENT HOLDING
PERIODS
Holding period return = r (T) = (price increase + income)/ P(T)
Where P(T) is the price paid today for a zero-coupon bond with maturity date T.
The zero-coupon bond with longer maturity will have a lower present value and a
lower price, therefore providing a higher total return. Face value is the price you
paid when buying the bond. The present value is how much it’s worth right
now.
The total return on each bond can be calculated with:
Typically, an investment return is expressed as an effective
annual rate (EAR), this is defined as the percentage increase in funds per year.
EAR = (1 + r(T)) ^m – 1, where m is the compound.
The above is more relevant for long term investments. However, investments
over a shorter period <1 year don’t really use compounding. This is being called
annual percentage rates (APR). For example, the monthly interest rate
multiplied by 12 you must pay for debt within your credit card balance.
With n compounding periods per year, we can find the EAR from the APR by first
computing the per-period rate as APR/n and then compounding for n periods:
You can calculate the APR by:
If n gets larger, we effectively approach continuous compounding (CC), and
the relation of EAR to the annual percentage rate (R cc) for the continuously
compounded case, is given by:
Here is e is approximately 2,71828. To find
rcc from the effective annual rate (EAR), you
use the following formula:
Ln(x) is the inverse of exp(x).
, CHAPTER 5.2 – INTEREST RATES AND INFLATION RATES
Interest rates directly determine expected returns in the fixed-income market.
There are four fundamental factors that determine the level of interest rates:
- The supply of funds from savers, primarily households.
- The demand for funds from businesses to be used to finance investments
in plant, equipment, and inventories (real assets or capital formation).
- The government’s net demand for funds as modified by actions of the
Federal Reserve Bank.
- The expected rate of inflation.
There are two types of interest rates: nominal interest rate and real interest
rate. The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the dollar value of your
account grows. The real interest rate is the rate at which the goods you can buy
with your funds grows (inflation). The consumer price index (CPI) measures
the purchasing power by averaging the prices of goods and services in the
consumption basket of an average urban family of four.
Suppose the rate of inflation (i) is running at i=6%/ so a loaf of bread that cost €1
last year might cost €1,06 this year. Last year you could buy 1.000 loaves. After
investing for a year, you can buy €1.100/€1,06=1.038 loaves. The rate at which
your purchasing power has increased is therefore 3,8%.
, this can be rearranged to solve for the real state as:
.
A common approximation to this relation is .
There are three basic factors that determine the real interest: supply, demand,
and government actions. The nominal rate is the real rate plus the expected rate
of inflation.
The supply curve: the higher the real
interest rate, the greater the supply
of household savings.
The demand curve: when the real
interest rate on the funds needed to
finance projects are lower, you want
to invest more in physical capital.
Through changing fiscal and monetary
policies, the government and the central
bank (Federal Reserve) can shift the supply
and demand curves.
Irving Fisher argued that the nominal rate
ought to increase one-for-one with expected
inflation, E(i). The so-called Fisher
hypothesis is:
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