# Key Rate Duration for MBSs greater than Key Rate Tenor

Key Rate Durations (KRD) are essentially some fixed income instrument's price sensitivity to a non-parallel shift in interest rates (i.e., a shift at the "Key" Rate). For example, a 10-year bond's sensitivity to a 1% change in only the 5-year interest rate would be that bond's 5yr KRD.

Let me refer to any fixed-income instruments that are not straight bonds as exotics (e.g., MBSs, CMOs, ABSs, etc). Is it possible to get KRDs greater than the respective key rate tenor for exotic fixed-income instruments without leverage? I tend to see this behavior most often in MBSs. For example, I'm looking at the KRDs for some MBS (comprised of ARMs if I'm not mistaken) with CUSIP: 36225DA20. The KRDs from Bloomberg as of now are:

Key Rate    KRD
6mo         0.92
1yr         -0.72
2yr         -0.81
3yr         0.49
5yr         0.56
7yr         0.63
10yr        0.43
20yr        -0.08
30yr        0


A couple things stick out. The 6mo KRD is 0.92, which I thought would be too high. However, there are also several negative KRDs, (which I don't find as unusual).

Could anyone please shed some light on these figures and how they tie out?

Thanks!

• Well, first of all, the "duration" in a "key rate duration" is really just the sensitivity of the instrument to changes in that particular rate. The sum of them should roughly add up to the duration of the instrument to a parallel shift. KRDs can get muddied if the curve is using a global interpolation, and in exotics and MBS, it all depends a lot on the pricing model, for instance, how prepayments are correlated with particular rate shifts. That said, I'm not an MBS expert. Definitely don't think of "duration" as any sort of time, it's just a delta. – experquisite Nov 12 '14 at 20:58
• The exact numbers you get depends (and can vary quite a bit) upon the underlying curve that is shocked: par or zero-coupon/spot. Therefore, curve construction can also impact these numbers (esp short and long end). The best thing to do would be to grab a spreadsheet and recover the key-rates...if you have the underlying curve (and can revalue the security) it is straightforward. – Rusan Kax Dec 15 '14 at 12:25