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.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What are the Differences in S&P...27 Views
finance a la shmoop what are the differences in S&P's, and Moody's
ratings? capital letters. really that's about it the assessment of the rating
itself is about the same. the people work at both companies all came from about [grinning men walk in front of a school]
the same schools the same semi diversified backgrounds and well they
all eat the same white bread. note the nomenclature differences here though.
Moody's does in fact look kind of moody with a big fat capital letter in the
beginning followed by small letters and slightly different notations. the S&P is
all in caps all shouting all the time. the metrics behind say a quote highly [chart shown]
speculative bond unquote down here are about the same for both companies but
the slight differences are worth noting so that when you see a rating well you
know just by the way in which it's written who wrote it.
now as for actually understanding bond ratings well that's a different story. to [document shown]
most people they might as well be hieroglyphics. [confused woman reads paper]
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