Stopping rules for selling bonds

Abstract

We model the problem of selling or issuing bonds so as to maximize the selling price (minimize the interest rate) as an optimal stopping problem for a random process or time series. Available information on, or predictions of, the price at a future time are included as a constraint on the process. Both continuous-time and discrete models are analyzed. For the case in which the predicted future price is normal or Gaussian we obtain good estimates of the optimal stopping strategy and expected gain. A significant conclusion is that the nature of the optimal strategy can be very sensitive to the relative variance of the predicted future price.