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.