Understanding bonds.

Bonds — the securities with which states, banks and companies borrow money from savers — form the largest financial market in the world: more than one hundred and sixty trillion dollars, still more than the entire equity market. With the return of interest rates, millions of Italians have gone back to buying them; but behind the homely appearance of a coupon lie mechanisms — the effective yield, accrued interest, duration, the ranks of repayment — that almost nobody has ever properly explained to them.

This guide was born to close that gap: to tell, in plain language and taking nothing for granted, what you really own when you own a bond, why its price moves if the promise is fixed, how much it can swing and how that is measured, which signatures and which clauses deserve trust, and what happens when the moment comes to settle up with the taxman.

It is an independent guide: it promotes no product, names no private issuers, and does not replace personalised advice. It provides the foundations — the ones every investor should have before deciding.