Dates of coupon payments of a bond's portfolio - Excel - vba

Question

I'm a little bit newbie about excel-vba but I am trying to construct a function that gives me the dates of coupon payments for a bond.
Giving a simple example I have this two bonds:
Nominal value: 100;300
Coupon rate: 0,06 ; 0,05
CPN_Freq:
4;
2
Months:
3; 6
Settlement:
01-11-2001;
01-11-2001
Maturity:
15-12-2003;
15-05-2005
Basis: 0;1
And what I want is the date of the coupon payments for each bond, for the first it will be:
15-12-2003 15-09-2003 15-06-2003 15-03-2003 15-12-2002 15-09-2002 15-06-2002 15-03-2002 15-12-2001 01-11-2001 (each in a cell)
I made this code but is not working.
Function CouponDate( Maturity As Date, Settlement As Date, Months
As Date)
For i= Maturity - Months
If Maturity - Months > Settlement
CouponDate = i - Months
Else
CouponDate= Settlement
End if
End Function
Could u give me a help please? Thanks :)

Answer 1

You cannot use a function because you have multiple return values.
You can use a Sub (without return value) that then writes the return values directly in the desired cells. That's what the additional parameter FirstOutputCell is for: it defines the first cell that should be written.
Public Sub CouponDate(Maturity As Date, Settlement As Date, Months As Long, ByRef FirstOutputCell As Range)
Dim i As Long
Dim CouponDate As Date
i = 0
Do
CouponDate = DateAdd("m", -i * Months, Maturity)
If CouponDate <= Settlement Then
CouponDate = Settlement
End If
FirstOutputCell.Offset(i, 0) = CouponDate
i = i + 1
Loop While CouponDate > Settlement
End Sub
If you have Maturity, Settlement and Months in the cells B1, B2 and B3 respectively a call of CouponDate Range("B1"), Range("B2"), Range("B3"), Range("B4") would fill the cells B4 through B7 with the coupon dates (if you want the output in columns not rows simple switch the parameters of the Offset() function).
Of course you can also call the function directly specifying the parameters: CouponDate #5/30/2003#, #11/1/2001#, 3, Range("B4")
Make sure the first two parameters are of type Date. Passing the string "15-12-2003" might work, depending on the locale that is set for your OS. Better is to either use an Excel cell formatted as date or - as shown above - date literals of the form #m/d/yyyy#.
The above code will work correctly even for maturity dates at the last day of month. If you want to change the code to be more flexible so that you can specify the days between two coupons you would also have to take into account the appropriate day count convention, making this a whole lot more complicated.