The Yield Curve Has a Pop Quiz(dle)

Somewhere right now, a portfolio manager who passed all three CFA levels on the first attempt is confusing modified duration with Macaulay duration. Not in a meeting — in their head, quietly, while looking at a Bloomberg screen they pay \$24,000 a year to rent. They will not Google it. They will nod along when someone on the desk says "duration" and silently hope the context clarifies which one.

We built a quiz for that person.

Five Questions. Every Morning. No Mercy.

Quizdle drops five CFA-level fixed-income questions at midnight UTC. Duration, convexity, repo, term structure, auction mechanics, monetary policy — the curriculum you crammed in 2019 and haven't revisited since. Four choices. One answer. A detailed explanation after each, because the wrong answer is where the learning lives.

Everyone gets the same five questions on the same day. Deterministic seeding. No rerolls. No second chances. You either know that modified duration divides by $(1 + y/2)$ or you don't, and tomorrow's questions won't be easier.

After all five, you get a Wordle-style emoji grid:

🟩🟩🟥🟩🟩

Paste it into the group chat. Somebody who runs \$2 billion in fixed income is about to get a red square on clean vs. dirty price and claim they misread the question. The leaderboard — Today and All Time — will record everything. We considered a Hall of Shame but decided some wounds should heal in private.

How We Ended Up Building Five Tools in One Week

The quiz was supposed to be a standalone thing. Then we started writing questions about duration at current yields and realized we didn't have a calculator on the site to check the answer against. Embarrassing.

So we built the duration calculator. Modified duration, Macaulay duration, DV01, convexity — every Treasury maturity, live curve, updated daily. Per-tenor pages for the kind of person who bookmarks the 30 Yr convexity and checks it before coffee.

Then we needed rolldown. If you're showing someone duration at every point on the curve, the next question writes itself: which maturity pays me the most for doing nothing? Rolldown & carry decomposes expected return into carry (coupon minus funding) and rolldown (price gain from sliding down a steep part of the curve). Pick your horizon. Find the sweet spot. Right now it's in the belly, which it usually is, but "usually" is doing dangerous load-bearing work in that sentence.

Then scenarios. Rolldown assumes the curve doesn't move. The curve always moves. The scenario simulator takes today's curve and hits it with shocks — parallel shifts, twists, or preset macro regimes. Fed Hikes +100 bps. Recession -150 bps. Stagflation. Bear Flattener. You see the shocked curve overlaid on today's, with price impact at every maturity. It answers the question every PM asks after an FOMC meeting, except you can run it before the meeting, which is when the answer has value.

Then history. If you're going to simulate a bear flattener, you should check whether the current curve has ever looked like the result. The screener searches every Treasury curve since 1990 by yield level, slope, regime, and date range. Every day the 10Y topped 5% in a Bear Flat regime. Every day the 2s10s sat within 5 bps of zero. The question "has this happened before?" deserves a faster answer than scrolling through FRED.

Five tools. One week. The quiz started it. Scope creep finished it.

The Point

Each tool compresses something that used to take real effort into something you glance at. The duration calculator replaces Fabozzi Chapter 4. The rolldown chart replaces a carry analysis that took a terminal and 20 minutes. The scenario simulator replaces the pre-FOMC homework. The screener replaces the intern you'd send to pull historical analogues.

The quiz doesn't replace anything. It just tells you whether you still remember what all the other tools are computing.

Five questions. No time limit. The leaderboard is watching.