We now pivot away from equities and back to fixed income, where we talk about options in the context of the U.S. mortgage market. We briefly walk through exchange-traded options before introducing over-the-counter (“OTC”) options like payer and receiver swaptions, caps, and floors. We’ll also give you a crash course in the primary variables, or “Greeks” that drive option pricing and hedging: delta, vega, gamma, and theta.
Fixed Income Sales, Trading, & Investing
Our Fixed Income Sales, Trading, and Investing Course is the only one of its kind that will take you from the basics of bond math all the way to the sophisticated strategies used by real Wall Street professionals.
Whether you’re an ambitious beginner looking to land a job or an experienced finance practitioner looking to sharpen your edge, this course arms you with the technical skills and the intuitive framework to thrive in the world of Fixed Income.
Peek Inside the Course
Part 1
Bond Math Basics
Become an expert in the fundamentals of fixed income: bonds and interest rate mechanics. In part I, you’ll master key financial concepts like the difference between equity and debt investments, build working definitions of fixed income terminology (e.g., principal, maturity, coupon, daycount, optionality, etc), and finally understand how loans are securitized into bonds.
We guide you through building a dynamic bond valuation spreadsheet model using Microsoft Excel, illustrating the calculation of future and present cash and getting your feet wet with Fixed Income valuation principles. You’ll build an understanding of interest rate exposure (long vs. short rates), bond pricing jargon like “discount”, “premium”, “par”, “yield to maturity” and “dirty price”, and calculations or modified duration and DV01.
Our self-paced course uses examples from pop culture, including a case study based on the fictional company Waystar Royco from the TV show Succession, to explain corporate debt issuance and the roles of sales, trading, and research within investment banks. By the end of Part I, you will have moved from foundational concepts to mastering sophisticated valuation techniques through hands-on learning. You’ll have mastered the inverse price/yield relationship, practical methods of risk quantification, and thinking about non-linear risk.
10 + hours
of Content
Module 1
Introduction
We give you an overview of everything we’ll be covering in Part I, and define the roles of Sales, Trading, and Investing, and set you on a path to build intuition around market mechanics and Fixed Income Valuations.
Module 2
Testimonial
We explain how and why we started our careers in Fixed Income, discuss the evolving career paths, and cover the options for entry into (and exits from) some of the most coveted seats on Wall Street.
Module 3
Interest Rates for Dummies
We paint a picture of the difference between debt and equity investments, introduce the fundamental concepts behind interest rates, specifically term premium and credit spreads, and provide an intuitive framework for understanding “long” vs. “short” rates exposure.
Module 4
Case Study Intro: Corporate Borrower
We introduce our GoJo/Waystar case study to illustrate how a corporate borrower interacts with various divisions of the bank and various roles within the Sales, Trading, & Research division when faced with interest rate risk.
Module 5
Intro to Securitization
We explain how banks package individual loans into bonds, effectively transferring the cash flows and risk exposure to investors to free up precious capital.
Module 6
Key Terms
We define essential bond characteristics from an investor’s perspective, covering principal, maturity (bullet vs. amortizing bonds), fixed vs. floating rate coupon payments, frequency, daycount conventions, and the concept of embedded optionality.
Module 7
Intro to Corporate Bond Issuance
We touch on the role of the Syndicate group within Debt Capital Markets and dive deeper into how credit spreads are calculated, ultimately through the lens of their impact on borrowing costs with a future eye towards valuation.
Module 8
Time Value of Money
We introduce the discounted cash flow model for bond valuation through the mathematical formula used to convert future cash flows into present values and vice versa.
Module 9
Build Your Own
You’ll get hands on experience building a simple bond calculator in Microsoft Excel to calculated the net present value of a bond’s future cash flows and determine its price.
Module 10
The Price/Yield Relationship
Using the model you’ve built, you’ll get practice exploring the price/yield relationship by seeing how bond prices respond to changes in market rates. We’ll calculate the dirty price of a bond to incorporate accruals, use the IRR function to calculate a bond’s Yield to Maturity (“YTM”), and discuss the difference between YTM, Yield to Call, and Yield to Worst.
Module 11
Macaulay Duration
We introduce the concept of Macaulay Duration as the cash weighted time to receiving all your cash flows from a bond. We demonstrate the relationship between maturity and duration, and explain the role Macaulay Duration plays in portfolio construction.
Module 12
Modified Duration and DV01
We convert our Macaulay Duration into Modified Duration and DV01 to quantify the price yield relationship and demonstrate how traders and investors use these metrics to size their risk.
Module 13
What Else Impacts Duration?
We examine the factors that influence a bond’s duration, such as maturity, coupon, market rate, payment frequency, etc. and focus on the rapid-fire real world applications of DV01 as a measure of risk exposure.
Module 14
Convexity 101
We introduce the concept of convexity as the second derivative of the price yield function and an inherent characteristic of bullet bonds, using it to describe our change in duration relative to moves in underlying rates. You’ll learn why positive convexity is the superpower of bonds like U.S. Treasuries.
Module 15
Negative Convexity
We explain the intuition behind negative convexity as an inherent property of bonds with embedded call options (e.g., mortgages), whose duration shortens as rates rally and extends as rates sell off, making these instruments harder to hedge.
Module 16
Who Cares about Bonds, Anyway?
We break down the various clients of the Fixed Income Division at an Investment Bank, from real money to fast money and convexity hedgers to corporations, and provide a rubric for understanding their investing needs as hedgers and speculators, always with an eye towards how fixed income investments fit into their portfolios and investment objectives.
Interested in the course? Buy Now 
PART II
Fixed Income Derivatives
In part II, we’ll explore the world of Fixed Income Derivatives, explaining how instruments like interest rate swaps provide simplified, customized, highly leveraged and liquid exposure to the rates market. We’ll walk through a case study of a corporate hedger using a rate lock to mitigate interest rate exposure around a debt issuance, and you’ll get the chance to model and value a forward starting SOFR swap in Microsoft Excel. Moving beyond linear derivatives, we get into options — from swaptions to interest rate caps and floors — using a simplified pricing model to intuitively understand how key inputs drive valuation. We’ll move from there into mortgages, specifically understanding how TBAs are used to by investors and hedgers alike to manage negatively convex portfolios. From there, we tackle the credit derivatives market with an introduction to the mechanics and uses of Credit Default Swaps (“CDS”) and the Foreign Exchange (“FX”) market, where players all over the world use spot FX and forwards to manage currency risks and express a view on interest rate differentials.
Once you’ve finished Part II, you’ll be ready to put it all together and understand how real investors use all the products you’ve learned about to implement real trading strategies across the fixed income markets.
Module 1
Intro to Derivatives
This module builds off of what we learned in Part I and expands into derivatives. We explain the reasons various players use derivatives, from the standpoint of balance sheet optimization, customizability, leverage maximization, and liquidity.
Module 2
Leverage and Funding Basics
We explain how institutional investors, such as hedge funds, use the funding markets and “repurchase agreements” (“repo”) to borrow money and maximize their leverage. You’ll learn the mechanics of a levered long position and a short position in the Treasury markets and translate those net cash flows into the concept of carry. From here, it’s an easy, intuitive jump to understanding a derivatives.
Module 3
Intro to Futures and Interest Rate Swaps
We explain some of the most basic derivative contracts in the fixed income world that give investors levered exposure to the Treasury market. From simple exchange traded products, we move on to interest rate swaps and frame our understanding of swaps through the lens of a synthetic bond funded at SOFR. We explain how we calculate the net present value of a swap’s cash flows similar to those of a bond, and outline the concept of a “par” or “at the money” swap.
Module 4
Interest Rate Swaps: History and Regulations
We provide the historical context necessary for understanding how the interest rate swap market evolved from LIBOR to SOFR, and introduce the concepts of swap spreads and counterparty credit risk.
Module 5
Modeling an Interest Rate Swap
You’ll get hands on experience building an interest rate swap from scratch in Microsoft Excel. You’ll learn the standard market conventions for a plain vanilla SOFR swap and learn how to solve for the “par” or “ATM” swap rate.
Module 6
Off-Market Swaps
This module teaches you what happens when rates move, and how to calculate the mark-to-market or net present value of an interest rate swap with intrinsic value. You’ll learn the concept of PV01, one of the primary risk metrics necessary for derivative traders, based off the intuition from DV01 in Part I.
Module 7
Swaps in Practice: Rate Locks
You’ll learn the real-world application of forward starting interest rate swaps used by corporate hedgers in the form of “rate locks”. We return to our case study and see how our corporate borrower uses a rate lock to mitigate their risk to rates rising around their planned debt issuance.
Module 8
Modeling and Executing a Rate Lock
You’ll model a rate lock in Microsoft Excel, and understand how the various desks at an Investment Bank — such as the swaps desk, sales desk, and CVA desk — collaborate to determine the bid/offer spread relative to a mid-market price.
Module 9
Valuing and Unwinding a Hedge
This module will take us through the day the deal closes in our case study, when bonds are actually issued and our rate lock hedge is unwound. We’ll walk through the mechanics of unwinding a derivative trade and gauge the effectiveness of the hedge from our issuer’s standpoint.
Module 10
Interest Rate Swaps for Asset/Liability Management
We’ll discuss how other clients of the bank and banks themselves use swaps for purposes beyond hedging.
Module 11
Intro to Options
In this module, we introduce options as derivatives that add an element of conditionality to our market views. We start off using equities as an example, illustrating the payout profiles of puts and calls, and walking through the primary reasons that investors use options to express a view or limit their downside exposure. We also introduce several key drivers of option value, like strike price, implied volatility, and skew.
Module 12
The Interest Rate Options Market
Module 13
Basic Swaption Pricing
We’ll walk through the various types of option expiries, from European to Bermudan to American, and the complexities of normal vs. lognormal vol models. You’ll learn the basic inputs of the Black-Scholes formula for pricing swaptions, and use some shortcuts to build your intuition about how certain variables influence option value.
Module 14
Intro to Mortgages
This module provides background on the U.S. residential mortgages market and the role of the GSEs in creating pass-through securities. We’ll talk about the element of prepayment risk and the negative convexity profile of mortgages. You’ll learn about “TBA”s, the forward contracts of the mortgage market, and the way lenders and servicers use them for rate lock hedging, while other investors use them for liquidity, yield, and benchmark allocation purposes.
Module 15
Intro to Credit Default Swaps
We get into greater detail explaining how credit spreads are determined in the cash bond market, and walk through the mechanics of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) as an efficient way for investors to get credit exposure in a leveraged, balance sheet optimized, liquid way. We talk about how various hedgers and speculators utilize CDS to buy and sell protection on individual names, and how the indices are used for more liquid, broader exposure to the asset class.
Module 16
Intro to Foreign Exchange
We explain the basics of the over-the-counter FX market, covering how currency pairs are quoted, who trades them, and why. You’ll learn about key trade types including spot FX and FX forwards, understand how global corporations use the FX markets, and master the theoretical concepts that drive the relationships between currency pairs.
Interested in the course? Buy Now
PART III
Macro and Relative Value: from Theory to Trades
In Part III, you’ll take all the knowledge you’ve built in Parts I and II to the next level, learning how real investors, traders, salespeople and researchers interpret economic data or signals from the Federal Reserve and use that information to put dollars at risk. We’ll set you up with a practitioner’s guide to understanding monetary policy and economic data, plus an insider’s manual to understanding how Treasury auctions work
and how to interpret their outcomes. From there, we’ll explain how and why investors trade the Treasury market from both a global macro and relative value standpoint. We’ll cover the little-understood Treasury Bond Basis, TIPS, and inflation derivatives. And from there, we’ll move into a walk-through of the mechanics and risk profiles of some of the most oft-used trades in Fixed Income: curve steepeners and flatteners, butterflies, conditional curve trades, and a variety of option structures (strangles, straddles, condors, costless collars, risk reversals, and put/call spread trades).
While this information is truly accessible to novices, by the time you’re done with this course you’ll have the intuition and fluency of a seasoned Fixed Income professional.
Module 1
The Practitioner’s Guide to Monetary Policy and Economic Indicators
Cut through all the noise when it comes to understanding the financial markets, and learn what you need to focus on, what it actually means, and how the news you see in the financial press translates into fundamental markets theory.
Module 2
U.S Treasuries: Basic Macro and Relative Value Theory
We’ve talked a lot about the “risk free rate”. Well, where does it actually come from? We dive deep into the term structure of interest rates, how Treasuries react to risk on/off signals, supply/demand dynamics, and the difference between on-the-run and off-the-run Treasuries.
Module 3
US Treasuries: Auction Deep Dive
Detailed, desk-level insight as to the mechanics of Treasury auctions: how they work, decoding the jargon, and learning to interpret the results of each auction when it comes to implications for the market.
Module 4
US Treasuries: The Treasury Bond Basis
FINALLY, a simplified breakdown of the legendary “basis trade” you can actually understand! We’ll explain the structural differences between cash and futures that lead to arbitrage opportunities, the math around conversion factors, calculating gross & net basis, and determining the implied repo rates that give us our “cheapest to deliver” (“CTD”) into a Treasury futures contract. We’ll show you how master arbitrageurs have made billions exploiting the tiniest shifts in the yield curve in these leveraged positions.
Module 5
TIPS and Inflation Derivatives
You’ll learn the mechanics of a niche product: Treasury Inflation Protection Securities, a special type of Treasury bond that offers inflation protection unlike most other fixed income instruments we’ve discussed. We’ll also get into the basic mechanics of CPI swaps.
Module 6
Curve Steepeners and Flatteners
We’ll unpack the reasoning behind and mechanics of some of the most basic trades in Treasuries and Swaps exploiting mispricings in the shape of the yield curve. We’ll review the macro and relative value factors that impact curve shape and walk through how investors might express a view in either cash or derivative form.
Module 7
Butterflies
Building on our curve trades, we’ll explore how investors use butterflies in Treasuries and Swaps to express a view on the shape of the yield curve.
Module 8
Conditional Curve Trades
We add an element of conditionality to our bull and bear steepeners and bull and bear flatteners using swaptions.
Module 9
Straddles, Strangles, and Condors
We walk through some of the most commonly-used swaption structures.
Module 10
Costless Swaption Collars
What if our corporate issuer decided to use something other than a forward starting interest rate swap to hedge their interest rate risk? We explore the costless swaption collar as an alternative risk management tool.
Module 11
Risk Reversals and Put/Call Spreads
We build on the principles established with our costless collar and explore risk reversals and put/call spreads, synthesizing everything we’ve learned about volatility and skew.
WHO WE ARE
FRIENDSHIP. FINANCE. FUN.
Two lifelong friends, former investment bankers, and teachers who want to make finance education exciting. We combine deep technical expertise with creativity and high energy.
Graduates of Princeton and Brown who worked at Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Barclays Capital
Veterans of the Financial Sponsors (IBD), Project Finance (DCM), Equity-Linked Securities (ECM), CDO Structuring (Fixed Income Sales & Trading), and Interest Rate Sales (Fixed Income Sales & Trading) groups at bulge bracket Investment Banks
10,000+ hours teaching incoming analysts and associates at the world’s most elite Investment Banks (Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, & more), Private Equity Firms (Blackstone, Silverlake, TA Associates, & more), Hedge Funds, and Business Schools (Harvard, Wharton, and more).
We have a top ten Apple careers podcast, a social media following of 300,000+, and now: self-paced courses for you to learn with us in our signature style.
What people are saying
I just wanted to say thank you for making the content you make. The Wall Street Skinny has been a huge resource for learning about finance and taught me a ton about recruiting. If it weren’t for The Wall Street Skinny, I don’t think I would have known the effort it takes to get an internship. I recently accepted an offer at Blackstone and this course has been a big part of my journey. Thank you!
JOHN
Happy customer
Extraordinary course simplifying complicated concepts. I am in my 70s and have spent 50 years in the industry across law, investment banking, sales & trading, and high net worth investment management, but have yet to encounter anyone capable of making Wall Street as accessible and fun as these ladies.
JR
Happy customer
As a University Career Coach specializing in Finance and Consulting, I recommend this podcast to all of my students. The detail and expertise is spot on and their energy is infectious!
KS
Happy customer
FAQ
Who is this course for?
This course is designed for anyone aiming to break into or advance within the world of Fixed Income. If you’re preparing for an internship in Sales & Trading at an Investment Bank or other market-maker, this program gives you the exact toolkit you need to succeed and stand out. It’s equally valuable for professionals pursuing (or already working in) careers at hedge funds, asset managers, private wealth firms, or registered investment advisors where dealing with the public debt markets is a core responsibility. Whether you’re just starting out or sharpening your skills, this course is your fast track to fluency in Fixed Income.
Can I use a Mac?
Yes! All you need is Microsoft Excel, and the course is fully compatible with both Mac and PC users.
What makes your courses different from your competitors?
The truth is, our competitors don’t offer anything like this. There is simply no other program that takes you from the basics of bond math through the complexities of derivatives and real world trading strategies, while distilling decades of markets experience into a single practitioner’s companion. Other courses might drill you on formulas; we build your intuition FIRST, then show you how to apply it like a pro from day one. Others might lean on textbook theory; we teach you the tools and tricks actually used at the world’s most prestigious banks, asset managers, and hedge funds. While most programs barely cover the basics of new hire training, we accelerate you through the knowledge that typically takes YEARS of apprenticeship to absorb. And unlike competitors who recycle PowerPoint slides and outdated case studies, our course uses dynamic, hand-edited visuals and fresh, pop-culture-infused examples to keep learning relevant, practical, and engaging.
Do you offer a certificate upon completion?
Yes! Upon finishing the course and completing all the assessments, you’ll receive a certificate of completion. You’ll be able to add that line item to your resume, showcase your mastery of Fixed Income concepts and practical skills in any interview, and demonstrate your skill to potential employers and colleagues.
The Skinny on Wall Street
The Wall Street Skinny Newsletter
Tired of sifting through perplexing financial jargon? We’ve got you covered. Sign up for our newsletter where we share realtime market insights, day-in-the life stories from practitioners on the desk, trading challenges, case studies, interview questions, lifestyle & fashion tips, and more!