Guides to gilts and to using GiltIQ, written against the site's own data and pages.
The portfolio cash-flow schedule lists every coupon and redemption the gilts in a portfolio have left, dated to the day it is paid and projected to final maturity, so the money a portfolio will receive can be read before it arrives.
A portfolio's return comes from two places in each holding — the coupon it paid and the change in its price — and the portfolio view and its performance page split the return across the holdings so each gilt's part can be read.
Realised P&L is the gain or loss already booked on positions sold or redeemed, unrealised P&L is the mark-to-market on what is still held, and the portfolio view keeps the two apart before adding them to a single total.
A portfolio's weighted duration is an average, and an average hides how the holdings are spread around it — two portfolios with the same weighted duration can respond very differently when the yield curve changes shape rather than shifting in parallel.
A portfolio's modified duration is the market-value-weighted average of its holdings' durations, and multiplying it by the portfolio's value gives the pound move a one per cent shift in yields would produce — a measure of interest-rate sensitivity, not a statement that the money is safe.
IRR since inception is the annual rate that makes the present value of every cash flow in and out of a portfolio — buys, coupons, sales and the current value — come to zero, so it measures the return on the money actually committed rather than on a unit of the portfolio.
A single number — one holding's share of a portfolio's market value — says how much of the portfolio's income, price sensitivity and eventual redemption depends on one gilt, and the portfolio view puts that share against every other holding.
Each gilt carries its own daily yield change, and across a portfolio those changes differ — the spread between them, multiplied by each holding's modified duration, is what actually moves a portfolio's value from one report to the next.
Between two dates a gilt's return is the sum of several things happening at once, and the attribution tab splits it into the four rows it names — carry, rolldown, variation and a residual it calls unexplained — so each part can be read on its own.
A portfolio can hold several gilts and still return most of its money in a single calendar year, and the cash-flow analysis makes that concentration visible by totalling each year's income and redemptions side by side.
Modified duration turns a change in a gilt's yield into an estimate of how far its price moves, and a one per cent move in yield scales roughly by the duration — so the figure says as much about a holding as it does about the gilt.
The cash-flow analysis page takes the gilts in a portfolio, projects every remaining coupon and redemption, and groups the totals by UK tax year so the income and the capital that fall in each year can be read together.