Eric Rome works in the back office at Finance Solutions, a limited liability firm that specializes in designing basic and sophisticated financial securities. Most of their clients are commercial and investment banks, and the detection, and control of interest rate risk is Financial Solution’s competitive advantage.
One of their clients is looking to design a fairly straightforward security: a callable bond. The bond pays interest annually over a two-year life, has a 7% coupon payment, and has a par value of $100. The bond is callable in one year at par ($100).
Rome uses a binomial tree approach to value the callable bond. He’s already determined, using a similar approach, that the value of the option-free counterpart is $102.196. This price came from discounting cash flows at on-the-run rates for the issuer. Those discount rates are given below:
Using the binomial tree model, what is the value of the callable bond?
The price of the callable bond is $101.735.
What is the value of the call option embedded in this bond?
Given in the problem is the value of the bond’s option-free counterpart: $102.40. From Part A we’ve determined the price of the callable bond to be $101.735. From the relationship:
Vcall = Vnoncallable – Vcallable
We can determine that the value of the call option is $102.196 – $101.735 = $0.461.
Which of the following steps that Rome would go through in calculating the effective duration of this callable bond is incorrect?
A) |
Add the option-adjusted spread (OAS) to each of the spot rates in the interest rate tree to get a "modified" tree. | |
B) |
Impose a small parallel shift to the interest rates used in the problem by an amount equal to +?. | |
C) |
Given the assumptions about benchmark interest rates, interest rate volatility, and a call and/or put rule, calculate the OAS for the issue, using the binomial model. | |
Calculating effective duration for bonds with embedded options is a complicated undertaking because you must calculate values of V+ and V–. Given the information in the problem, this requires following seven steps:
Step 1: Given the assumptions about benchmark interest rates, interest rate volatility, and a call and/or put rule, calculate the OAS for the issue, using the binomial model.
Step 2: Impose a small parallel shift to the interest rates used in the problem by an amount equal to +Di.
Step 3: Build a new binomial tree using the new yield curve.
Step 4: Add the OAS to each of the 1-year forward rates in the interest rate tree to get a “modified” tree. (We assume that the OAS does not change when the interest rates change.)
Step 5: Compute the new value for V+ using this modified interest rate tree.
Step 6: Repeat steps 2 through 5 using a parallel shift of -DI to obtain the value for V–.
Step 7: Use the formula duration = (V– + V+) / 2V0(DI).
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