Trading the Fixed Income, Inflation and Credit Markets: A Relative Value Guide
A practical guide to relative value trading across fixed income, inflation and credit markets, showing how to find the best way to express a market view using bonds, swaps, futures and options.
Trading the Fixed Income, Inflation and Credit Markets by Neil C. Schofield and Troy Bowler is a Wiley Finance book that takes a different approach to teaching financial markets. Instead of heavy academic theory, it focuses on one central question: what is the best way to express a particular market view? The authors call this “relative value” and build a framework around it that connects spot markets, forwards, swaps and options into a single decision-making triangle.
The book covers nine chapters starting with product fundamentals (bonds, repos, credit instruments, derivatives) and building through pricing relationships, risk management and practical trading strategies. The middle chapters apply the relative value framework to sovereign bonds, yield curve trading, credit markets and inflation-linked instruments. Each chapter moves from theory to practical application with worked examples.
What sets this book apart is its accessibility. The authors deliberately avoid the heavy mathematics found in most finance textbooks while still being rigorous in their explanations. The final chapter, a collection of A-to-Z trading axioms, captures decades of market wisdom in a format that sticks with you. Originally published in 2011, many of the core concepts around relative value analysis, risk management and market psychology remain just as relevant today.