Price updates when owning bonds directly

[Matthew19]

Silly question : I bought my bonds through the bond desk at fidelity. Am I seeing an up to date price for the bonds when I look at my portfolio through fidelity or is delayed a day?

[murphy_p_t]

pricess updated overnight...not throughout day...something like 10pm eastern time..

[barrett]

Yeah, with Fidelity the price update is even later than that... sometime after midnight. You can really only get an accurate idea of portfolio value by checking after the bonds update. For several hours during the trading day Fidelity shows the closing values from the previous day (and the increase or decrease in price). Then, at some point before they actually update around 1:00AM EST, they show values that are unchanged.

A great source for an up-to-date look at the PP is Ryan Melvey's Stable Investing site. The Recent Performance page has an "Intraday Interplay" chart which updates every minute or so. If you know the size of your PP and can do some basic math, you'll be able to figure out how much you are up or down for the day.

[Xan]

If you know the size of your PP and can do some basic math, you'll be able to figure out how much you are up or down for the day.

Yowza.

[Matthew19]

Thanks guys. I don't plan on checking daily or anything, but since I just made my first purchase for the PP it's cool to watch the non-correlation at play.

[dualstow]

Although I have google drive sheets with specific bond prices set up with the help of members like fnord, I usually just look at what TLT is doing during the day. It's not perfect, but it's as good as going to the Wall Street Journal and reading about bonds.

[dualstow]

Google Sheets seems to update later than it used to. I used to see changes shortly after 3pm EST. Not so, these days.

[foglifter]

Although I have google drive sheets with specific bond prices set up with the help of members like fnord, I usually just look at what TLT is doing during the day. It's not perfect, but it's as good as going to the Wall Street Journal and reading about bonds.

dualstow, could you share the formula you use to get the bond price? I used to use the following formula, but at some point it stopped working and I wasn't able to fix it.


=index(ImportHtml("http://fixedincome.fidelity.com/fi/FIBo ... XXXX",1,10),5,2)

[dualstow]

Sure. By the way, it does seem to be updating in a timely manner after all. I think I got this from fnord and one other bright spark.
If it looks like I'm dumbing it down, that's just in case brand new readers come across this. I know most of this will be obvious to you.

Code: Select all

=vlookup(date(2040,11,15),wsj!A200:C380,3,FALSE)

Instead of using a cusip, you can see that I had to fill in the date of maturity.

Now I don't remember if the authors of this code accessed the Wall Street Journal directly, but I found it convenient to have a tab right in my spreadsheet that loads the data. wsj! refers to that tab.

Put this in place of that tab name, or if you do it like me, make a tab called wsj and put this in cell A1:

Code: Select all

=importhtml("http://wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3020-treasury.html", "table",0)

Newly bought bonds are eventually out of bounds of those cell references, so I just make the numbers bigger. A200:C380 above used to be A100:C200 or something like that.

[foglifter]

Thanks, your explanation made sense and worked like a charm! 

[sophie]

dualstow,

I've seen you post this before and I definitely wish I could take advantage of your excellent tips! 

However I have a mac and it seems unable to do queries (mac-ism for "import html").  Something about needing to install an ODBC driver.  I'm not crazy about installing an SQL database on an old macbook just for this, not to mention pay money to do so.  Does anyone know how to work around this??

[foglifter]

dualstow,

I've seen you post this before and I definitely wish I could take advantage of your excellent tips! 

However I have a mac and it seems unable to do queries (mac-ism for "import html").  Something about needing to install an ODBC driver.  I'm not crazy about installing an SQL database on an old macbook just for this, not to mention pay money to do so.  Does anyone know how to work around this??

Sophie, you must be talking about Excel. The formulas above are for Google Sheets, which is all web-based hence you don't have to worry about ODBC drivers. Just open the browser, log into your Google account, create a spreadsheet and voila!

[sophie]

Thanks!

I prefer not to keep my PP spreadsheet on Google, but at least it's nice to have a "calculator" for Treasuries available.

[dualstow]

Right, what foglifter said. I don't use excel anymore and have never tried Apple's numbers app,
but I am on a Mac using Google Drive / Docs / Sheets.

[mercuryfish]

A great source for an up-to-date look at the PP is Ryan Melvey's Stable Investing site. The Recent Performance page has an "Intraday Interplay" chart which updates every minute or so. If you know the size of your PP and can do some basic math, you'll be able to figure out how much you are up or down for the day.
[/quote]
would you like to give me the link of Ryan Melvey's Stable Investing site???I Can't find it out.thank you.

[gizmo_rat]

would you like to give me the link of Ryan Melvey's Stable Investing site???I Can't find it out.thank you.

http://www.stableinvesting.com

[TrevorShrade]

Sure. By the way, it does seem to be updating in a timely manner after all. I think I got this from fnord and one other bright spark.
If it looks like I'm dumbing it down, that's just in case brand new readers come across this. I know most of this will be obvious to you.

Code: Select all

=vlookup(date(2040,11,15),wsj!A200:C380,3,FALSE)

Instead of using a cusip, you can see that I had to fill in the date of maturity.

Now I don't remember if the authors of this code accessed the Wall Street Journal directly, but I found it convenient to have a tab right in my spreadsheet that loads the data. wsj! refers to that tab.

Put this in place of that tab name, or if you do it like me, make a tab called wsj and put this in cell A1:

Code: Select all

=importhtml("http://wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3020-treasury.html", "table",0)

Newly bought bonds are eventually out of bounds of those cell references, so I just make the numbers bigger. A200:C380 above used to be A100:C200 or something like that.

Another options is you could use:

Code: Select all

=ImportXml("http://wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3020-treasury.html","//tr[td='11/15/2040']/td[3]")

which would access the Wall Street Journal directly everytime and not need the extra tab.

[Kriegsspiel]

Once fnord's formulas stopped working, I just started getting the price off Vanguard. Is that the same thing?

[economicsjunkie]

Silly question : I bought my bonds through the bond desk at fidelity. Am I seeing an up to date price for the bonds when I look at my portfolio through fidelity or is delayed a day?

In Fidelity I always look up the current price under "Positions":

- click on the bond line item
- click on "View details for UNITED STATES TREAS BDS."
- click on "Price & Performance"
- then under "Price(Bid)" you can see the price at which you can currently sell the bonds