# Duration

> Duration prices uncertain timing and optionality inside mortgage cash flows

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:real-estate-mortgage:bond-math-tba:duration` |
| Family | Bond Math & TBA Market |
| Domain | Economics |
| Era | Agentic Age |
| Kind | metric-or-force |
| Archetype | The Gauge |
| Claim layers | empirical, cultural_historical, synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory |

## What it is

Duration is a metric or force in the Bond Math & TBA Market family, defined here by the function it performs in the property system rather than by label alone.

## What it actually does

Duration prices uncertain timing and optionality inside mortgage cash flows.

## Why it exists

It exists because place is unique and immovable while law, capital, information, and human lives must still coordinate around it across time.

## System mechanics

- **Who uses it:** underwriter, appraiser, investor, developer, regulator
- **Incentives:** comparability, predictive usefulness, decision speed, auditability
- **Inputs:** observations, definitions, time period, comparison set
- **Outputs:** signal, comparison, threshold, decision input
- **Dependencies:** Land, Authority, Information, Capital, Time

## Archetypal reading

- **Essence:** Duration prices uncertain timing and optionality inside mortgage cash flows
- **Gift:** Clarity about duration makes a hidden allocation of place, time, authority, value, or risk available for deliberate choice.
- **Wound / Shadow:** When duration is treated as neutral or inevitable, its costs can be shifted to people who hold less information, authority, liquidity, or mobility.
- **Failure mode:** The failure mode appears when duration is stale, opaque, mispriced, misrecorded, overextended, or applied outside the conditions that made it useful.

## Lenses

- **Personal:** Notice where duration appears as a structure in your own commitments: what is held, promised, priced, protected, excluded, or deferred?
- **Business:** Duration reveals a handoff among information, authority, incentives, operating work, and capital. Make the owner of each handoff explicit.
- **Financial:** Duration changes the timing, priority, comparability, liquidity, or distribution of cash flow and risk.
- **Property:** Duration changes how a physical place can be used, valued, financed, transferred, occupied, maintained, or reclaimed.
- **Community:** Duration can create benefits inside one parcel while exporting costs or opportunity to neighbors, institutions, or future residents.

## Divination

The Gauge enters the reading through Duration. The issue is not only what is visible; it is which map of ownership, time, risk, authority, or belonging currently governs the situation.

**Question:** What is Duration measuring—and which important reality has been left outside the denominator?

**Guidance:** Change the denominator, time horizon, and stakeholder. If the conclusion changes, the map—not only the number—was doing the work.

## Game function

Sets or modifies a threshold; players may stress it by changing rates, time, or cash flow. Initiative 3.

## Relationships

Relationships are recorded in the typed graph.

## Oppositions

- Use Value versus Exchange Value
- Speed versus Diligence

## Historical lineage and regulatory context

Read Duration through the lineage of Bond Math & TBA Market: earlier customary or local arrangements became recorded, standardized, financed, regulated, digitized, or contested over time.

Rules vary by jurisdiction and transaction. Use the cited primary sources as starting points and verify current local law, program guides, contracts, and professional standards before operational use.

## Visual direction

Text-free rounded-square enamel artifact for Duration: a calibrated enamel field where one measured boundary visibly changes the exposed and submerged portions of an asset; vitreous midnight enamel, blackened steel, warm brass, copper accents, mortgage-paper cream, deep green, slate, and sky blue.

## Engine output / Sentinel handoff

The generative interpretation above is preserved as Engine Output. Sentinel factors: jurisdiction-specific rules, factual uncertainty. These factors request contextual review; they do not delete or silently rewrite the candidate.

## Research / provenance

- [TBA Trading and Liquidity in the Agency MBS Market](https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/2013/1212vick.html) — Federal Reserve Bank of New York; TBA mechanics and liquidity.
- [Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities Operations](https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/desk-operations/ambs) — Federal Reserve Bank of New York; agency MBS operations, dollar rolls, coupon swaps.
- [Dodd-Frank Act Rulemaking: Asset-Backed Securities](https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/dodd-frank/assetbackedsecurities.shtml) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; ABS and RMBS securitization, tranching, disclosure.
