# What are Generic government treasury bonds? (Bloomberg terminal)

I have a project at school were we are supposed to find the generic series for US treasury bonds, and then download daily data for 3 years. I have found the bb ticker, but i don't understand the difference between regular and generic series? I have managed to download daily last price data for multiple maturities. After the data is downloaded, I am supposed to calculate the average return, either by yield to maturity or total return. This is were I'm stuck. I know how to calculate YTM, but am i really supposed to calculate the YTM for every single day (Prices changes) and then take the average of all of these YTMs? Is there something I'm missing? The problem set really doesn't specify what kind of data we are supposed to download for the series, but I couldn't find any thing called YTM when importing the data to excel. If I could do that, i presume that i could just have taken the average of all the YTMs.

Thanks!

• Get clarification from instructor. The 'generic govt 10 year yield' for the 10 year benchmark bond is USGG10YR Index. It tracks YTM of a changing benchmark bond over time (the 10 year bond of 10 years ago is a different bond from today's 10 year bond obviously). From this yield you can calculate approx returns with various approximation formulas. – noob2 Mar 27 '17 at 17:07
• Thanks, I downloaded LX_LAST and something called YLD_YTM_MID. Might the later one be the yield? – TheNarsisisst Mar 27 '17 at 17:16
• These are prices and yields of individual bonds, not generic indexes. – noob2 Mar 27 '17 at 18:05

You can see all the US generic yield indices by typing ALLX USGG into your terminal. This will give the generic indices for multiple maturities. From there just pick the maturities you need.
This index is quoted in YTM, so if you want the average yield, you can export the last price series (PX_LAST) from the terminal or pull the series into Excel and take the simple average.
=BDH("USGG10YR Index", "PX_LAST", start_date, end_date)

• Yes, that's the generic 5yr yield and is one of the available tenors. The GGR (Generic Govt Rates) command will list all the available countries. – msitt Mar 27 '17 at 18:21