What do you use to check bond prices?

Water Cooler Investing
#1

Bond prices are a bit of a pain to find. I mean corporate bonds.

#2

I use the bloomberg terminal, outside of that I imagine it would be a real pain.

#3

+1. I dont think they are regularly reported via public means. I assume you could get them via S&P CapIQ and o ther premium services.

Just logged into my TDAmeritrade account and can view bond prices, although not sure if they are last traded or some sort of mid price.

#4

Fidelity is actually an excellent place for this if you have an account. You can search by company, rather than by CUSIP, so it’s way easier to see all the current bonds available.

#5

TDA and most online brokers will just represent the last price traded. You can generally call their FI desks and get more realtime quotes (which they’ll be pulling from Bloomberg) as well as more choices than may be displayed on their sites. Be sure to negotiate and work the trades. Bonds trade much differently than equities.

#6

ALLQ?

#7

It’s probably very difficult to find it. The pricing quality on Bloomberg itself isn’t even that great – you need to receive runs from the brokers to get real bid/ask.

I think the best public source you can have is the FINRA Trace website. I use the nearest maturity CHK bond as an example since I imagine it’s trading pretty actively. You put the CUSIP in to load it up.

http://finra-markets.morningstar.com/BondCenter/BondDetail.jsp?ticker=C590743&symbol=CHK3983295

You can click on “Trade History” and see the trades actually done via TRACE.

#8

I typically just use TICKER then select the bonds for that issuer that I want and use YASQ. BB uses trace now with a delay so I think it’s on the same level as FINRA or at least we have that service integrated. On YASQ I also get all of the quotes our organization gets from trade runs imported onto the same screen.

#9

thanks BS

#10

If you click over onto the graphs tab, you can also see what G spread and price have done over the past

#11

Thanks all. Gonna play with this on Monday when the mkts open. In my IB account I could only find a screen to place orders which required the CUSIP, but didn’t see an area to check prices. To be fair Ilooked, but didn’t click every tab, but all of the info/sites I found googling led me to sites that didn’t work, or whatever.

#12

As far as I can tell, Fidelity only gives data online if they have inventory. Is your experience different?