Using Our New Municipal Bond DataCenter
January 27, 2009The new MunicipalBonds.com has a variety of new tools and features. During February, we will be in our testing phase leading up to our official launch on March 1.
We believe that MunicipalBonds.com has launched the best way to keep updated on municipal bond trading with our new Trade Datacenter. There is simply no better way to sort through the thousands of trades each day to see exactly what you want to see.
Here’s a quick tour:
You can click on any of the links below and it will open up a new window, so you can follow along without losing your place on this tutorial.
Let’s start with municipal bonds by State.
On each State page, you will first go to the page with the most recent trades for this state’s municipal bonds.
On the yellow-highlighted area below, you can see Recent Trades, Highest Yields, Most Active Issues, and you can even sort Yields by Year.
Recent Trades: Every trade for this state’s municipal bonds that happened today.
Highest Yields: All of the trades in each state’s bonds sorted from highest yield to lowest yield.
Most Active Issues: The top 50 of the state’s bonds that reported the most trades.
Yields by Year: This is basically the data used to compile yield curves. For every state, we show you exactly how many trades happened for each maturity year. This is the yield curve:
When you click on a year, such as 2015, and you will now see every single trade that happened for bonds with the maturity year 2015.
For every trade in 2015, You can see exactly the dollar’s traded, whether the bonds were bought or sold, and what the yield was.
The Best Search in Municipal Bonds: Aside from the main elements, you can also search using a variety of keywords. We have the easiest way to search municipal bond trades. You can simply type in the CUSIP number, a town name, a maturity year, or category to see all of the bonds that fit your search term. For instance, “Bakersfield” gets you all of the trades that happened in bonds with Bakersfield in the description.
By Category:
In addition to search, you can click on many bond sectors to immediately to find a set of bonds in your state that traded within each sector.
Such as Schools:
When you click on Schools, you will see every bond that traded today that corresponds with the search term “School”. You can see every California school bond that traded today.
Click on a Bond:
Anytime you see a security description (bond issue), you can click on it. When you click on it, you will see all of the trades reported that day for that particular bond. You will also be shown the history of every trade for this particular bond in our database.
After you click on a bond, you will see that the name is written in plain English. If you have ever been confused as to what the acronyms mean, the description will tell you exactly what the fully-spelled out Security Description is.
More from this issuer:
When you are looking at Poway Calif Uni Sch Dist Spl Cmnty Facs Dist No 14-area A, maybe you want to see everything issued from Poway California School District.
Click on ‘More From this Issuer’: Once you have clicked on a bond issue, you can click above to see every trade of all bonds issued by the same issuer.
If you want to see an even broader set of bonds from Poway, simply type “Poway” in the search.
On any page, if it is underlined, you can click on it. You can click on Security Descriptions, Maturity Year, Yield, Coupon, Price, to see all of the trades sorted by the field that you clicked on. If you click it again, it will invert the order. If you click Yield once, it will sort all of the trades on a particular page from highest yield to lowest yield. Click on it again, it will sort from lowest to highest.
The new features are nice, but please do not eliminate the old alphabetical list of all bonds traded that day for a particular state. It was a simple way to gather a lot of information fast.
Howard, you can see all of the trades alphabetically. Simply click the heading that says “Security Description” and it will sort of all of the trades alphabetically. We’ll try our best to create this view.
and please keep the daily reports on tobacco bonds, pension bonds etc…
The quantity of information and ability to pinpoint bond types by state is great!! I can’t seem to find a way to pull up a Cusip number here, which is really disappointing.
please retain archive for prior days’ trades…
also, is it possible for columns to remain in same order as previous format for consistency when exporting to excel, etc.?
scott - we’re going to enable the archives for prior days’ trades very soon. We didn’t realize how popular they were. Give us a couple of days. For previous days’ trades, we’ll try to leave it in the same format as old. However, please click around on the new site…anything underlined is clickable. There is a huge variety of views and insights you will be able to develop by clicking around. Thanks for your support.
Bhu
BWeyer - We’ll try to make this easier, but on the http:// address bar, you can see the CUSIP number. During the early part of next week, we’ll make the CUSIP more accessible. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
For now, when you click on a security description, the address bar (http://www….) the last set of characters are the CUSIP number. You can cut (ctrl-c) and paste in the search box.
Bhu
I’ll add the tobacco and pension fields for the states. For now, you can type ‘tobacco’ or ‘pension’ in the search box and you will get all of the bonds related.
please bring back the archive. Thanks.
Will historical trades be available from 2008 and earlier?
Where did you put the feature that I have been using for the last year? I need to see an auction rate security that only trades each Friday. My web page always started with AZ bonds and a series of dates down the left side. All I hade to do was click on the date for last Friday then scroll down to the bond I was interested in to see the volume and number of trades. Where have you hidden that info? Thanks.
Jerry - We will make this happen. Give us a couple of days. We’re moving a lot of data from the old site to the new site.
Bhu
I may just be accustomed to doing what Jerry Traver described to find my bonds, but using Search for several days gets me nowhere. Two prerefunded CA Golden St Tobacco Sec Corp 2003 Refunded examples:
38122NAP7 2033-Jun
38122NAQ5 2039-Jun Golden St Tob Securitization 6.75
What would you use in Search to locate last trade? My results make it seem like the new site trades are a subset of the old site trades.
Bill, the search only works for the most recent day’s trades. We will be adding the previous month’s worth of trades to the search field, it will be ready soon.
http://california.municipalbonds.com/bonds/issue/38122NAP7
http://california.municipalbonds.com/bonds/issue/38122NAQ5
This is a very poor substitute, but for now, you will notice how your CUSIPs are simply added to the end of the URL in the address bar. You will be able to see the trade history this way.
On the contrary, I think your URLs are MOST EXCELLENT substitues!
My needs in that area can be taken care of with my own page of URLs.
What seems odd is that your 38122NAQ5 URL lists trades for every day last week, yet Search wouldn’t find the CUSIP on those days (nor yet today). At the top of your …NAQ5 trades page, it lists the correct maturity date:
Maturity Date: 2039-06-01
yet every trade show 2039-Dec in Maturity Date column. If I click on the linked 2039 there, I only get 8 trades for “today” with 2039 Maturity.
http://california.municipalbonds.com/bonds/maturity_year/2039/date:2009-02-09
If I change the last character of that URL to 6, I see 17 trades, and change to 5 I see 37 trades. None of them are 38122NAQ5. Those would appear to be the view I searched on those days looking for the issues. Or using the 2-Feb link in Recent Trade Dates takes me to a total of 164 trades on 2-Feb
http://california.municipalbonds.com/bonds/recent/date:2009-02-02
I would have expected the 2-Feb trades listed in http://california.municipalbonds.com/bonds/issue/38122NAQ5 to appear there and searching through the browser page’s 164 items.
Even if I don’t understand why it is this way, I’m a happy camper.
Bill - The thing with this particular security description is that there is no state specified in the Security Description…it says Golden State. The security isn’t being categorized as a California bond because we detect a bond’s state by the security description. As such, the CUSIP # 38122NAQ5 exists in our system, but it isn’t indexed to the proper state. We’ll figure it out here shortly.
Will you be adding Guam and other territories?
In your categories you don’t sort by general obligation. Particularily at the state level, this would be helpful. Am I missing something in the category designations?
Thank you for the answer about alphabetical viewing. Any chance of allowing all the bonds of a state to be displayed on one page, as before, instead of 17 as now required for California?
we’ll create a single-page view this week.
How about adding a category for insured bonds?
would love to see a complete discription of a muni ex. calls, ave life,sinking funds when they start and if they are active now with the amt. called to date, would like to see on a page everything that is out there on bloomberg… also iam a dealer can we buy on the site bid side buyer..offer bonds etc… please reply you have my email and phone number 732 982 8520 ext 440 j.v.
Did you discontinue the email service for trades and prices? Please continue!
New to investing…how does one purchase these bonds? OTC? Direct? Where?
Thank You
RLM
Will you be sending daily emails on Trades and Prices for Tobacco Bonds again? This has been a usefull tool.
Thanks
John - We will be sending the e-mails out once again. The reports are available on the site. Just click the state you are looking for and select the “Yield & Prices Report” and you will see exactly what you used to get via our e-mail service. The benefit is that you can click on the security description within the list and get a look at every trade that happened that day.
On the tobacco bonds report, we are working on some things. For now, you can enter tobacco into the search field or tob and you should get a list of tobacco bonds in any given state.