Income Builder - Additional Fixed Income Information Sources |
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Back to Index Most fixed income investment resources are geared to institutional investors and are therefore either difficult to obtain or quite expensive Still, there are many fixed income information sources available for individual investors which are quite useful. First, I recommend that you look closely at your existing resources, especially major newspapers such as the Wall St. Journal, New York Times and Financial Times. You probably have focused primarily on stock-related investment information and so will likely find, to your great surprise, that each of these newspapers offers something unique and useful for fixed income investors. Beyond that, as you might imagine, there are many information sources available for fixed income investors on the web. Here is my list of some of the most useful resources: FINRA.org (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). FINRA is the independent regulatory authority formed by the merger of the regulatory arms of the NYSE and NASD. It developed a system known as TRACE (Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine) through which brokerage firms who are FINRA members are required to report their fixed income trades. The data produced by the TRACE system is available to individual investors through this website. Market Data: FINRA’s market data section, www.finra.org/marketdata, provides useful information on both the stock and bond markets and includes several sections. The main page has a 17-min. tutorial that points out all of the features available on the site. Company Information: Provides a snapshot of information including recent trading prices for a company’s equity and fixed income securities, all on one page.
Bond Center:
http://cxa.marketwatch.com/finra/BondCenter/Default.aspx The Bond Center home page provides summary data on daily corporate bond trading activity, including performance data on two key benchmarks: the FINRA/Bloomberg Investment Grade Index and the FINRA/Bloomberg High Yield Index. It also gives a list of the day’s most actively-traded corporate bonds, which is carried in the pages of most major business newspapers. Performance data on the FINRA/Bloomberg benchmarks is reported daily in the financial pages of the New York Times. Through the Bond Center, investors can also view detailed information about the FINRA/Bloomberg benchmarks, including a list of all of the bonds that comprise each index (with links to recent trading activity on each bond). Watchlist. One of the Market Data section’s most useful features is the Watchlist, which allows you to get current pricing on your own personal list of U.S. Treasury, corporate and municipal bonds all on one page. The Wall St. Journal and The Wall St. Journal Online http://online.wsj.com/public/us – (subscription required) Read the Credit Markets column in daily Wall St. Journal to keep track of activity in the U.S. Treasury markets and also major news in other sectors, especially corporate bonds. The Markets Data section of the Wall St. Journal Online provides a variety of daily statistics on the bond market and various sectors within it. For example, you can get yields and spreads on a number of indexes, such as the Barclays BBB U.S. Corporate and Merrill Lynch High Yield indexes. Barron’s and BarronsOnline www.barrons.com (subscription required) also offers some useful tools including its weekly Current Yield column and bond market statistics. On the web site, you can also see a weekly list of bond rating upgrades and downgrades. U.S. Treasury – Daily Treasury Yield Curve The U.S. Treasury offers daily closing yields on Treasury securities ranging from 1-month T-Bills to 30-year Treasury bonds at http://www.treasury.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-management/interest-rate/yield.html. The site includes historical yield curve levels going back for many years. TreasuryDirect.gov This is the website of the U.S. Treasury Dept. which allows you to purchase and sell U.S. Treasury securities and savings bonds directly from the government, with no commission. It also provides information about U.S. Treasury securities, including the results of recent offerings and, for example, the detailed inflation-adjustment calculations on TIPS. U.S. Federal Reserve has a number of economic reports and detailed interest rate statistics available on its website at www.federalreserve.gov. A wide range of daily and weekly interest rates from commercial paper to Treasuries to swap rates is available. The site also provides the text of the messages accompany decisions of the Federal Open Market Committee and major speeches by Federal Reserve Board members. Ratings Agency Websites All of the credit ratings agencies have websites that offer free content provided that you register. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s generally limit the amount of information available for free. However, Fitch Ratings offers a surprisingly large amount of free content, which is usually quite good. Fitch Ratings www.fitchratings.com Moody’s www.moodys.com Standard & Poor’ www.standardandpoors.com Investing in Bonds www.investinginbonds.com Sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, this web site offers much of the same pricing information available on the finra.org web site and much more. For example, it offers performance charts on several bond indexes and periodic market commentary on the municipal, government and corporate sectors. It also has a bond calculator and other resources that are useful to those learning about bonds. Investing in Bonds Europe www.investinginbondseurope.com Also sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, this web site was launched in December 2008 to help educate investors in international bonds. The site offers articles on bond investing, sector index performance charts and data and a very simple search engine that allows investors to find information on specific bonds. The web site offers much useful information; however, the search engine is difficult to use, because it does not allow you to search for bonds by issuer name. Instead, it allows you to find individual bonds by their ISIN (International Securities Identification Number), maturity date or to see all listed bonds in a sector category. Hopefully, over time, the capabilities of the search engine and the web site, as a whole, will improve. Bonds Online Group The Group has several website devoted to fixed income investors. I must confess that I find the content here to be pretty disappointing. However, the Group has a newsletter, Yield and Income, which provides a summary of the fixed income and equity strategies recommended by the major broker firms. Its websites include: Bloomberg The purveyor of the Bloomberg terminal, which is the life source of institutional fixed income investors, Bloomberg is also a news service and media provider. Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Radio produce programs and stories that are of great interest to fixed income investors. On its website, Bloomberg provides some useful fixed income news and data, including: Bond market news and rates: http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates/index.html Corporate bonds: http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates/corpbonds.html podcasts of “On The Economy”, a daily (M-F) radio program
with host Tom Keene: Quantum Online www.quantumonline.com A free website (registration required) which that provides info on preferred stocks, closed-end funds and exchange-traded fixed income securities. The site gives links to the prospectus of each preferred stock offering, for example. Advantage Data. www.advantagedata.com This is a bond pricing service primarily for institutional investors. It offers pricing on investment grade, high yield and convertible bonds. It also provides access to fixed income research from brokerage firms and independent research providers. The service is not cheap. (Last I heard, it runs several hundred dollars per month.) But if you are into some heavy duty fixed income investing, it is a much less expensive source than some services offered by Bloomberg and Reuters, for example. Back to Index _________________________________________________________________________________ Originally published February 28, 2008. Updated December 13, 2008. Stephen P. Percoco © 2008 Lark Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Information is carefully compiled but not guaranteed to be free from error. Specific reference to any specific security should never be construed as a solicitation to either buy or sell. Reproduction without permission from the publisher is prohibited. |
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