Six months of Fed Funds market expectation in ten seconds.
The US Fed has hiked rates several times in the last year. What was the market's expectation for those hikes six or twelve month before they happened? To estimate that, you can ask many market participants about their expectations every day and then average the answers. This is the polling approach. Instead of asking where their mouth is, you can also look where their money is. Interest rate derivatives are the most liquid financial instruments, worth a lot more than many mouths. How do you read the market expectation in derivatives? The overnight-indexed swaps (OIS) are linked to the Effective Federal Fund Rates (EFFR). Those swaps are liquid and usually trade with standard tenors like 1, 2, 3-months. It is possible to extract from those instruments the market expectation about futures rates. This can be done in a systematic way using curve calibration on those OIS with interpolation mechanism that imply constant rates between FOMC meetings and allows for jumps on those dates. ...