Price, Yield and Spread: How Different Assets Are Quoted

A stock screen shows a price. A bond screen might show a price, a yield, or both, and traders quote to each other in whichever one is more stable. An interest rate swap screen shows a spread. A currency pair shows a ratio of one currency to another. New readers often assume "the quote" always means the same kind of number — it doesn't, and each asset class settled on its convention for a specific, practical reason.

The main conventions

Asset	Typical quote	Why that convention
Equities	Price per share (dollars/cents)	Direct, unambiguous ownership unit
Government/corporate bonds	Price per 100 face value, or yield	Price moves with coupon and maturity mix; yield strips that out and is comparable across bonds
Money market instruments (T-bills, CP)	Discount rate or yield	Instruments trade at a discount to face value with no coupon, so price alone is uninformative about return
Interest rate swaps	Spread over a reference curve, or the fixed rate itself	Traders care about the rate relative to the market's benchmark curve, not a "price"
FX	One currency per unit of another (e.g. 1.09 USD per EUR)	Both sides of the pair are currencies; there's no natural "face value" to price against
Credit default swaps	Spread in basis points per year	The number is literally an annual insurance premium, most naturally expressed as a rate

Why bonds get two numbers for one thing

A bond's price and its yield describe the same trade from two directions, and they move in opposite directions from each other. A 5%-coupon bond priced at 100 (par) has a yield of exactly 5%. If interest rates rise and the same bond is now only worth 95, its yield to maturity has risen above 5% — the buyer at 95 gets the same fixed coupons but paid less for them, so their return is higher. Traders quote in whichever number stays more stable for the conversation at hand: for a single bond's day-to-day moves, price feels natural; for comparing a 2-year and a 30-year bond with completely different coupons, yield is the only number that's actually comparable.

Spreads: the quote that skips the benchmark

Swap and credit markets quote in spread because the underlying reference — a swap curve, a Treasury yield — moves for its own macro reasons that have nothing to do with the specific instrument being traded. A corporate bond's credit spread over Treasuries isolates just the compensation for that issuer's default risk, stripping out the part of the yield that every bond, safe or risky, shares because interest rates moved. A trader working credit cares almost entirely about the spread; the underlying Treasury yield is somebody else's problem.