Guides to gilts and to using GiltIQ, written against the site's own data and pages.
New to GiltIQ, or stuck on a page? Start with the comprehensive Help — one walkthrough of everything the site does, from the market pages to the trade ledger and the reports.
The £5,000 starting rate for savings is a 0 per cent band on savings income that shrinks by £1 for every £1 of other income above the personal allowance, so the coupon income it leaves untaxed depends on the rest of a reader's income — and a single worked example makes the pound-for-pound reduction plain.
Gilt coupons are savings income, so the personal savings allowance shelters the first slice of them — £1,000 for a basic-rate taxpayer, £500 for a higher-rate one and nothing for an additional-rate one — and how far a holding reaches into that allowance depends on its coupon and size.
Disposals of gilts are exempt from capital gains tax for individuals, so a sale's realised gain or loss does not enter a CGT computation — but the coupons remain taxable savings income, so the exemption is about the capital, not the whole return.
A gilt's half-yearly coupon counts towards the UK tax year that contains its payment date, not the year you bought or sold it, so mapping a holding's payments to the right return is a question of dates rather than dealing.
The DMO yield follows the gilt market's twice-yearly, actual-days convention while the annual figure compounds once, and the two differ by an amount that grows with the level of the yield.
The net redemption yield is the gross yield with income tax on the coupons taken out, so the gap between the two columns depends on the coupon and the price rather than on the gilt's quality.
A gilt is quoted per £100 of nominal on a clean basis, and the pounds paid at settlement are that quote plus the accrued interest, multiplied by the nominal bought.
A gilt row can carry two price changes, one for the clean price and one for the dirty price, and they differ because the accrued interest moves every day and resets on each coupon date.
The trend column draws a gilt's recent yield history as a sparkline, and the twelve-month record behind it is the context that turns a single day's change into a meaningful move.
The Change column on a gilt row records how far the yield moved between two stored reports, and reading it correctly means knowing which two reports and what a blank cell means.
A guide to every column on the conventional gilts list, what figure each one shows and where that figure comes from.
A gilt is quoted per £100 of nominal value, so the pounds it actually costs are the dirty price multiplied by the number of £100 units bought.