fancy name for gov't debt when they borrow from you, it goes by diff name depending how long is the debt duration. The diff name serve to confuse you so you won't know when to cash it in. I am sure there are many people with this kind of papers and have no idea when to cash out.
Well, I'm going to laugh at you Gekko. How the hell you could you have been trading since 1999 and not know what a bond is? Obviously you don't have to know in order to trade stocks, but I must admit that I find it truly surprising that someone could have been around financial markets for four years and never had the interest to find out what a bond is.
[q] Quote from CalTrader FYI: the knowlege in Fabozzi is not just technical analysis applied to a bond chart. If this is your opinion then you have never studied the text: The details of bond pricing are a bit more complicated and do not have zero relevance to trading plans.[/q] I think you have misunderstood me (sorry, English is only my third language). What I mean is that if all a trader wants to do is take outright positions in t-bonds or bunds from charts, he doesn't need to read Fabozzi. Most people trading bonds from charts don't know what duration, convexity, basis, flattening or steepening means and they don't really need to know it (even if it would be better, certainly regarding flattening/steepening and how the yield curve behaves). I have been a professional bond trader for 5 years in Europe and first thing I was requested to do as a young trainee was study Fabozzi and pass an exam before I could turn on Bloomberg and Reuters.
Yes, you could get away with not knowing all the details but if I have the option I will take someone that has command of the details. In a large shop you can completely seperate the trading and analysis functions but in a smaller operation it becomes more important that everyone have a handle on technical details. I believe it leads to higher quality results.