The ballad of little "i"

  As a fresh decade gets underway there is one thing that is dominating the thoughts of investors and traders alike: interest rates. In my younger days as an investment banking analyst, a vice president told me that it took him 10 years in the business to realise that the most important data point in any valuation was the 10-year Treasury bond rate. Now, that vice president was not dense by any means. It is so easy even for the most seasoned analysts to get caught up in forecasting and estimating all of the other factors that go into valuing stocks, bonds, and commodities that they te...