Gyroscopic Investing

Anyone know of a website where one can enter specific bond allocations (funds, etf"s, individual treasuries) and arrive at the average duration for the portfolio.

I would recommend calculating AVG duration yourself as it is a good learning experience.

I'm sure if you posted your holdings and percentages someone would assist with the analysis.

I have only seen a duration calculator for one bond at a time:
http://www.investopedia.com/calculator/ ... cdate.aspx

I've just recently added an average bond duration calculation to my google spreadsheet.

It was an interesting exercise and I learned a lot from it.
Use the google finance "yield" and "duration" functions.  I did this for each of my bond holdings and then calculated the weighted average across my bonds.  I'm currently at about 21 years.  So... I'm more volatile than TLT and less volatile than EDV.

After getting intrigued about duration, I started calculating the equivalent duration number for my gold and equity holdings and quickly realized that all of the recommended approaches were just mental masturbation and math manipulation with no basis in reality.  So I didn't do that.  I'm happy with my bond calcs though.

Here's a sample from a bond I bought a few years ago:
[img width=600]http://i61.tinypic.com/2guyt1c.png[/img]
[img width=600]http://i57.tinypic.com/nc1aiw.png[/img]
(click to imbiginate)

The "yield" cell has:
=yield(B24,C24,D24,I24/10,100.0,2,1)

And the "duration" cell has:
=duration(B24,C24,D24,O24,2,1)

I don't know if it's fully imbiginated on my screen. Is there a yellow row below the blue one?

dualstow wrote: I don't know if it's fully imbiginated on my screen. Is there a yellow row below the blue one?

It sounds like you can see everything I intentionally posted.  The yellow row hinted at below the blue is a gold purchase - clipped off below the bond purchase.  I tried to show just one row of bonds - as that should be enough of an example for a duration calculation.  Happy to offer more if the that example is too minimal.

Cheers,
Mark

Mark,

Thanks.  I use Excel and apparently it provides the same functions.  I can use these values for individual bonds, and then get fund/etf durations from morningstar.com.

I guess then just applying the durations on a dollar weighted basis would give overall duration for a bond portfolio.