Alexander Düring's fixed income textbook retold as a 44-part blog series covering money, bonds, derivatives, trading, and risk management.
Fixed Income Trading and Risk Management by Alexander Düring is one of the few textbooks that treats fixed income as a full system rather than a collection of formulas. Düring spent over two decades in markets at Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank, and the book reflects that dual perspective: practitioner mechanics plus policy plumbing.
The book opens with preliminaries that most finance texts skip. It explains what money actually is, how commercial banks create deposits when they lend, how central banks set operational frameworks, and why quantitative easing did not behave the way textbook money multipliers predicted. Only after that foundation does it move into cash instruments: repos, bonds, floaters, yield curves, and liquidity.
Later sections cover inflation-linked debt, credit risk, covered bonds, mortgage-backed securities, bond futures, swaps, and practical trading strategies. The risk management chapters on PCA, hedging, mean-variance optimization, and portfolio rebalancing close the loop between market models and actual position management.
This blog series retells all 39 chapters in plain language, one post per day from May 18 through June 30, 2026. Each post summarizes the key ideas, adds reader commentary, and links forward through the full arc. If you want to understand how fixed income markets work from first principles to the trading desk, this is the map.