Editorial
Editorial standards.
A repo rate, a credit spread and a duration figure all move, and a candidate who quotes last quarter's number in an interview room is placed instantly. This page sets out where our figures come from, how they are dated, and how the worked arithmetic gets checked.
What counts as a source here
Fixed income markets publish more primary data than most subjects get: the Treasury's own auction and yield-curve data, the Federal Reserve's published rates and policy statements, SIFMA's market statistics, and the BIS and the ECB for cross-border structure. A dealer's market share or trading revenue comes from that bank's own earnings release, never from a leaderboard someone else compiled. A market-structure statistic that originates with a research firm is cited through the named outlet that actually published it, and a figure with no such trail does not appear as a fact.
How a figure gets dated
A repo rate, a credit spread and a bank's e-trading share all move, so every one of them carries the period it was true for rather than a bare number. Every guide shows the date it last changed in its byline, and that date moves only when something in the piece was actually updated, never on a schedule.
How the arithmetic is checked
A desk guide's worked example is not prose someone read twice, it is a calculation someone redid. Bond price and yield, Macaulay and modified duration, DV01 and convexity are computed a second time, independently of the draft, before the number is allowed to stand next to the method that produced it.
Corrections
A wrong number is fixed in the article the day it is found, and the guide's updated date moves to say so. A correction significant enough that someone preparing for an interview would want to see it gets a note at the point in the page where it matters, not buried at the bottom. Send one with the URL and the sentence.
The sources behind a desk guide
Ranked by how hard they are to argue with. A forum thread can tell you what a process felt like; it never gets to carry a number into a guide on its own.
- The US Treasury's own auction results and par yield curve data
- The Federal Reserve: published rate series, FOMC statements and Fed research
- SIFMA's statistics on Treasury, repo and securitized market volumes
- The BIS and the ECB, for market structure outside the US
- A dealer bank's own earnings releases, for its trading revenue and market share
- A dealer bank's own careers pages, for how its programmes are actually structured
- Named financial outlets, for a survey or a research-firm statistic reported through them
- What candidates describe on career forums about a process they sat, stated as exactly that, and never the source of a figure
AI disclosure
Language models help draft these guides once the research is already done: turning a sourced file into readable prose, drafting quiz questions for an editor to keep or throw out, and flagging where an early section of a long guide contradicts a later one. Nothing a model produces is published as it arrives.
The caution is specific to this subject. Ask a model to work out a bond's duration and it can get the direction of the price move backwards, treat a repo rate as if it were a central bank's policy rate, or quote a market-share figure that was accurate under a benchmark the market has since replaced. Every one of those arrives in the same confident sentence as something true, so a model's output is read harder than a filing, not more easily, and a person owns every figure and every worked calculation that reaches a reader.
Where the boundary sits
Used for
- Converting a sourced research file into paragraphs a reader can follow
- Suggesting quiz questions for an editor to keep, cut or rewrite
- Catching a place where a guide's later sections disagree with its opening
- Smoothing a passage that is factually sound but reads badly
Never used for
- Producing a yield, a spread or a dealer's market share with no source in hand
- Standing in for the second person who redoes a worked calculation
- Confirming that a filing or a dataset says what a draft claims it says
- Deciding whether a claim is strong enough to publish
Who stands behind this
Editorial direction sits with Tobias Wren, the pen name this publication writes under. No bank, recruiter or course provider named in these guides pays for coverage, and none of them reads a guide before it publishes. Where a guide points to an outside calculator or resource, it does so because it is useful there, not because anyone paid for the mention.
Questions about these standards or corrections: info@fixedincomeinterview.com