The most recently auctioned 90-day Treasury bill is often used as a proxy for the risk-free interest rate. Essentially, Rho estimates how much the price of an option contract should rise or fall if the assumed “risk-free” interest rate increases or decreases by 1% (of course, a 1% change in interest rates is quite substantial). The Greek that relates to interest rates is Rho. They are calculated using a theoretical options pricing model. Greeks, including Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega, and Rho, measure the different factors that affect the price of an option contract. To understand this concept, you need to have a basic understanding of option Greeks. Option pricingįirst, let’s review how the price of an option is affected by interest rates. Since no one knows whether that trend will continue, it might be useful to know what your options are. While the Fed has significant control over the short end of the yield curve, a sharp uptick in inflation expectations could cause longer-term rates to rise-which is what happened in early 2021.ĭespite a commitment by Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell to maintain a low interest rate environment for an “indefinite” period of time, by March 2021 interest rates on the 10-Year Treasury Note began to rise, hitting a 14-month high of 1.75%. The Fed began to gradually hike rates again from late 2015 through 2017, but those hikes were quickly unwound when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, and they have been essentially at zero ever since. When the global financial crisis forced the Federal Reserve to cut the Fed funds rate to essentially zero back in late 2008, option strategies intended to take advantage of rising interest rates became mostly irrelevant, and they remained so for the next seven years. More often than not, it seems that equity and bond markets operate completely independent of each other and that many of the old relationships between the markets and interest rates no longer apply. Like many historical relationships, the opposite may be true at different times and under different circumstances. But finding periods when this isn’t the case is not all that difficult. Conventional wisdom tells us that equity and bond markets tend to move in opposite directions most of the time, which leads to rising equity markets as interest rates increase.
Yet there has often been very little correlation between interest rates and margin debt. Their reasoning is that money becoming more expensive to borrow creates a disincentive for margin traders to borrow and trade equities.
Some economists and market analysts believe that interest rate increases have an adverse impact on equity markets.