Blue List

  

If you were a bond trader, you would not dream of missing a day reading the blue list. It would be like someone who stays home every day missing an episode of Days of Our Lives.

Published by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) on blue paper every business day since 1935, it lists municipal and corporate bond offerings, prices, ratings, coupons (interest paid), and anything else you need to know about the bond market.

Today, most traders get their information from BlueList.com, which provides bid-wanted lists, as well as a search engine that scans the databases of all 700 participating brokers. Here, dealers can search for the bond issues they need by state, maturity, coupon, and block size, as well as by what the funds will be used for, and any unique bond features.

So if James Bondtrader is looking for a revenue bond in the $5 million range in the state of Michigan with a 5-year maturity and a coupon rate of 4%, he can enter any of these data points into BlueList.com and perform a search. He will have many bond offerings to choose from. And all of them will be shaken, not stirred.

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the big three not least they are this week well for a much longer time Fitch

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has been the third leg on the you know stool Moody's supports this leg standard [Fitch, Moody's and S&P shown on a stool]

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and poors supports this leg and the big fat guy who sits right here yeah that's

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you, you the big fat walletd bond investor who relies on the scores of

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rating services in part like these to figure out how much risk premium you

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should attach to the bonds you're buying or rather the interest rate rent you

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should be charging the issuers for the privilege of renting your money

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well distinctively for Fitch's rating service well it's owned mostly by Hurst

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yes William Randolph flavored that Hurst you know rosebud [Man whispers rosebud]

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yeah well that's William Randolph yeah first big swing and media mogul no other

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kind of mogul you know if we lose a million dollars a year we'll have to

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shut our doors you know a hundred years yeah that one all right well Fitch's is

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a hundred-year-old global firm with feet in london and new york and well pretty

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much everywhere people rent money in the form of bonds and after all that time [Fitch's locations appear across the map]

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you'd think they could have come up with something a bit more creative than their

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bond rating system right here this thing yeah

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shmoop owned a bond rating service well we'd have had ratings like this [Shmoop ratings service appears]

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