Informed trading in government bond markets

Robert Czech, Shiyang Huang, Dong Lou and Tianyu Wang

Government bond yields serve as a benchmark for virtually all other rates in financial markets. But what factors drive these yields? One view is that yields only move notably when important news hit the market, for example monetary policy announcements. Others suspect that some investors have an information advantage due to their access to costly information (e.g. data providers) or more accurate interpretations of public information. In a recent paper, we show that two investor groups – hedge funds and mutual funds – have an information edge in the UK government bond (gilt) market, and that these two investor types operate through different trading strategies and over different horizons.

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Forming strong bonds: dynamics in corporate bond markets

Karen Braun-Munzinger, Zijun Liu and Arthur Turrell.

If a boat is unstable and someone jumps out, does it capsize the boat for everyone else? In a novel application of agent-based modelling, we examine how investors redeeming the corporate bonds held for them by open-ended mutual funds can cause feedback loops in which bond prices fall further, posing risks to financial stability. In our model, reducing the speed with which investors pull out their investments over time helps to keep prices stable and remaining investors’ savings on an even keel.

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