earliest relevant date
The earliest date at which data are needed by the helper in order to provide a quote.
latest relevant date
The latest date at which data are needed by the helper in order to provide a quote. It does not necessarily equal the maturity of the underlying instrument.
instrument's maturity date
sets the term structure to be used for pricing
warning Being a pointer and not a shared_ptr, the term
structure is not guaranteed to remain allocated
for the whole life of the rate helper. It is
responsibility of the programmer to ensure that
the pointer remains valid. It is advised that
this method is called only inside the term
structure being bootstrapped, setting the pointer
to this
, i.e., the term structure itself.
Base helper class for bootstrapping
This class provides an abstraction for the instruments used to bootstrap a term structure.
It is advised that a bootstrap helper for an instrument contains an instance of the actual instrument class to ensure consistancy between the algorithms used during bootstrapping and later instrument pricing. This is not yet fully enforced in the available bootstrap helpers.