Thursday, November 15, 2018

fixed income - Pricing Treasury futures


I've recently learned that at the delivery of Treasury futures the short side can decide which of the n Treasury bonds (with relevant maturities) to deliver. If the short side chooses to deliver the i-th bond, the the long side has to pay ciF for delivery, where ci is the conversion factor for the i-th bond, which is the value everybody knows. If the bond price at delivery is Bi then the short side delivers the cheapest-to-deliver (CDT) ˆi-th bond where ˆi=argmin1in(BiciF).

As a result, CDT bonds depend on the F whereas F itself shall be some kind of expected value of the delivered bond, that is F=EBˆiEcˆi.
From these arguments it seems that to find F one has to solve a fixpoint problem (1)(2), and it does not seem to be trivial even to prove existance there. Am I missing something?




In case I don't miss anything, I think the problem can be simplified as follows. To avoid all the discounting/margin account issues, let's talk about the forward contract the expires on one of the stocks Si where 1in. To each of these stocks we assign some constant adjustment weighting ci, and at the maturity of the contract the short side has to choose i and deliver the cash difference SiciF, where F is the forward price we agree upon now, and Si is the stock price at the delivery. I assume that neither of stocks pays dividends, and interest rates are 0. Of course, since it's a cash delivery, the short side will deliver Sˆi ˆi=argmin1in(SiciF).

Under these conditions it may be ok to assume that the forward price satisfies E[SˆicˆiF]=0
which of course translates into (2).





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