M&G Bond Vigilantes Christmas Quiz 2015 – the answers and the new champion

Thanks very much for another bumper stack of entries to the annual Christmas quiz.  This year’s winner, and new reigning champion is Jake Lewis of Morgan Stanley.  Congratulations, we will be in touch to see where you’d like the £100 charity donation to go.   You also win the Morrissey novel, as do the following brave runners up.  Gary Callow of Investec, (2014 champion) Marton Huebler of Fidelity Investment Management, Francis Sutch of Julius Baer International, and Guy Cullen of Barclays.

Happy New Year from all of us here on the bond team.  Here are the answers.

1. The non-existent roads and alleyways added to genuine maps by publishers hoping to catch people stealing their intellectual property are called trap streets.  Apparently these featured in a recent episode of Doctor Who, and as the Venn diagram of bond market geeks and science fiction fans has a large intersection, most of you got this one.
2. Hewlett Packard’s best-selling product is the bond calculator, HP-12C.
3. Brompton bikes are named after the view of the Brompton Oratory from their inventor’s first workshop.
4. In February this year, Emirates is launching a new, longest, scheduled flight – from Dubai to Panama City.
5. CARRY OVER RANK GNOME is an anagram of GOVERNOR MARK CARNEY.
6. The Fed Funds rate when Marty McFly started his time travelling in Back to the Future was 8% (we accepted the market Fed Funds rate of 7.87% as well as the official target rate).
7. Hornussen is a Swiss sport (shown on the coin in the quiz) in which you have to hit a puck (the “hornet”) through the air.  To be honest even Wikipedia doesn’t seem entirely sure what goes on in it.
8. The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show was named after the process by which music producers would know that they had a hit on their hands if the (Old Grey) doormen would whistle a new tune after hearing it played in the office.
9. The price of the bond was 102.
10. Music video 1: Doctorin’ the Tardis by the Timelords (not really the KLF, although both were Cauty/Drummond bands).
11. Music video 2: True Faith by New Order.
12. Music video 3: Roar by Katy Perry.
13. The rare baseball card shows Honus Wagner.  It’s rare because Wagner refused to allow more to be printed as he disapproved of children buying cigarettes to collect them.
14. Double Dip is a Swizzel’s sweet, and is what didn’t happen to the UK in 2012, despite the first release economic data suggesting it had.
15. Janet Yellen is hidden in the Santa costume.
16. Ryan Adams released a track by track cover version of Taylor Swift’s 1989 album last year.
17. The photo is from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
18. A satellite dish and a TV aerial decided to get married.  The wedding wasn’t much but the reception was amazing.
19. The Madison track cycling event was named after the New York venue where the event originated.
20. The schematic shows a simple neural network.  We also accepted anything to do with machine learning, or perceptrons, or Rosenblatt.