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Bonds are the institutional playground — and the allocation tool ordinary investors most often overlook.
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01 · Treasury Investment in Practice
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Bonds are the institutional playground — and the allocation tool ordinary investors most often overlook.
Chapter 09, "Bonds & Interest Rates," laid out the conceptual skeleton of "what a bond is" and "how interest rates rule assets." This chapter goes deeper into practical investing: how to buy Treasuries, what's actually playable in the Chinese bond market, how to read the yield curve, and how deep the credit bond waters run. Only by understanding rates and bonds can you grasp why the 2022 rate hikes crushed everything — and where money should go in an easing cycle.
⚠️ Risk Warning
This chapter is for learning and research only and does not constitute investment advice. All rates, yields, prices, and historical figures here are teaching approximations; defer to the latest market data and the latest regulations/policy. Bonds are not "risk-free": interest rate risk, credit risk, currency risk, and liquidity risk are all real. Assess your own risk tolerance before participating.
Treasuries are the anchor of global asset pricing, and the "cleanest fixed income" an ordinary investor can buy. Starting from instrument types (the maturities and quote conventions of T-Bills/T-Notes/T-Bonds), this piece covers how to read YTM, why price and yield move inversely (with an intuitive estimate for 30-year bond price declines), compares three access routes — direct brokerage purchases, Treasury ETFs (the duration differences among SHY/IEI/TLT), and QDII bond funds — explains with duration math why TLT crashed 30%+ during the 2022 hikes, and closes with allocation ideas for ordinary investors: comparing USD deposits/money funds/short-term bonds and choosing between locking long or short.
China's bond market is the world's second largest, yet over 90% of trading happens in the interbank market — the retail playground is the exchange market. After clarifying market structure, this piece focuses on the tools retail participants can actually use: government bond reverse repos (GC001/R-001, the seasonal rate spikes at month/quarter/year-end and how returns are calculated), savings bonds (counter mechanics of certificate-type and electronic-type plus early-redemption rules), risk-return tiers of bond funds, then a deep dive into convertible bonds (T+0, bond floor and conversion premium, forced redemption clauses, the double-low strategy, downward-revision games), ending with institutions' carry game and the real risks in the process of "breaking implicit guarantees."
The yield curve is the economy's thermometer: what each of its three shapes — normal-steep, flat, inverted — is saying, why inversion is historically a recession warning (6 of 7 US recessions since the 1980s were preceded by inversion), and why "inversion → recession → equity top" takes on average 1–2 years. It introduces the actual instruments for curve trading (Treasury futures, steepener/flattener spread trades, the domestic stock-bond see-saw), demonstrates with a numeric example how "a 50bp rise in US 10Y transmits into growth-stock valuations," and finishes with a practical weekly workflow you can actually execute.
Above Treasuries, all risk is credit risk. This piece explains what a credit spread is and what widening means (the common knowledge of spreads spiking in the 2008 crisis), dissects the probability calculus behind "why anyone buys 8%–15% high-yield paper" and the liquidity-drought trap when defaults cluster, reviews post-implicit-guarantee private-enterprise defaults and property-bond volatility in China (public events like Evergrande), and shows why the credit spread serves as a leading thermometer for equities as "the temperature gauge of corporate financing conditions."
债券与利率深潜篇 · 随堂测
3 concept questions · instant grading
Treasuries (US government bonds) are the anchor of the global risk-free rate and the 'cleanest fixed income' ordinary investors can buy — no credit risk (under the assumption that Treasuries don't default), only interest rate risk
China's bond market is the world's second largest, yet over 90% of trading happens in the interbank market — the institutional playground. Retail investors' real arena is the exchange market, and there's plenty to play with: government bond reverse repos, savings bonds, bond funds, convertible bonds
The yield curve isn't a 'chart for bond investors' — it's the thermometer of the entire macro world: central bank policy, inflation expectations, recession odds, and equity valuations are all written on this one line
Government bonds settle the risk-free rate; the other half of the bond world is credit — the possibility that a borrowing company defaults, priced openly by the market. That price is the credit spread
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23 · Forex Trading in Practice
[09-Markets & Instruments / 01-The Forex Market](../markets-instruments/forex-market.md) covered the "concepts" of forex