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You can search for secondary market offerings either by entering search criteria (e.g., coupon, maturity date, ask price) to return a list of securities that match your criteria, or by entering a CUSIP to return a particular security.
Most of the bond types (and CD types) Fidelity provides access to are available as both new and secondary issues. New issues are fixed income securities that may be purchased directly from the issuer through Fidelity, such as participating in a Treasury Auction, or submitting an indication of interest in a new Municipal bond offering. Once a security has been priced and issued, it moves to trading on the secondary market, which, for bonds, is predominantly an over-the-counter market.
For new issue bonds, purchasers do not pay a concession or markup for the transaction. Instead, the issuer pays a concession to the broker dealers that distribute the offering on their behalf. In the secondary market, owners of a bond pay a sales concession when they sell a bond, and buyers pay a concession when they purchase a bond.
Navigate to the Fixed Income page by selecting Research then Fixed Income & Bonds from the navigation bar. Here, you can either enter a CUSIP to search for a particular security, or enter criteria to refine your search and view a list of securities that match your criteria. You can search for Treasury, Municipal, Corporate, or Agency/GSE bonds, as well as Certificates of Deposit (CDs). You can also perform searches across New Issue Offerings and Secondary Offerings (i.e., combining multiple bond types in a single results display).
If you're searching by criteria, enter search criteria in the relevant fields on the Find Bonds & CDs a page. Navigate there by selecting Find Bonds & CDs in the middle of the Fixed Income landing page. You don't need to specify information for all fields, only those that will produce a listing of bonds that may meet your investment needs. If you want, you can select a sort order for the search results from the Sort By drop-down list. If your search doesn't return any results, click New Search to change your criteria and try again.
By selecting the relevant link on the Find Bonds & CDs page, you can view information about new issue offerings of Treasury and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) auctions, CDs, Municipals, Agency/GSE, Corporate and CorporateNotes ProgramSM bonds, and Structured Products. For new issue Municipal bonds, you see a summary screen showing all issuers. Click Search Offerings to see the individual securities offered by each issuer.
The search results pages indicate the total number of offerings found.
You can click an issuer's name/description to view additional information about a security (e.g., if it is callable, federal income tax exempt, minimum investment amount, coupon interest payment frequency, etc.).
Click Trade to enter an order to buy a particular security. Selecting Trade displays the Trade Fixed Income page and automatically fills in the selected security's CUSIP. (You may need to select the account in which to enter the order before you see the Trade Fixed Income page.) Click Participate to enter an indication of interest in participating in a new issue Municipal, or Structured Product offering.
MSRB stands for Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board. This regulatory body is responsible for making rules regulating dealers who deal in Municipal bonds, Municipal notes, and other Municipal securities.
Material events reflect information that issuers of municipal bonds file with the MSRB's Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) website at www.emma.msrb.org. Issuer events provide similar information for Corporate and Agency/GSE bonds (e.g., an upgrade or downgrade, or the issuer being placed on credit watch by ratings agencies like Moody's® and S& P®). Fidelity makes these events available to its customers for informational purposes only, and has made no independent evaluation of the information. You must make your own evaluation of the information and how it may influence your investment decision.
For secondary municipal and corporate bonds, you can view events or additional information (e.g., rating upgrades or downgrades) about these bonds if available. Material and Issuer Events are visible in the Attributes column of the bond search results table. If relevant events are available, "(ME)" or "(IE)" is displayed in the Attributes column. Click "(ME)" or "(IE)" to see the details.
Attributes, found in the far right of the offerings tables for Secondary bonds, New Issue Bonds, and CDs, highlight important attributes or features an investor should consider before purchasing a bond. These include whether the bond has Call Protection (i.e., is non-callable) or whether it has had any recent Material Events (for Municipal bonds) or Issuer Events (for Corporates and Agencies). For CDs, use Attributes to verify the CD is FDIC-insured or if it has Blue Sky restrictions.
The Bond Details pages provide over 40 additional information and data points about a fixed income security. The Bond Details pages are comprised of two separate pages, accessed via two tabs labeled "Offering" and "Analytics".
The Offering page lists features or characteristics of the bond that in most cases are permanent features specific to that issue (e.g., CUSIP, maturity date, call information). Two fields that can vary over time are the Moody's and S&P ratings, which rise or fall in line with the issuer's credit standing as assessed by those two ratings agencies. For callable bonds (bonds that do not have call protection), the Offerings page will indicate "Call Protection: No" and the word "No" will link to the call schedule (when available).
The Analytics page contains pricing data about the security or other analytics that have as their foundation a current price. In addition to the current offered price and related yield, the Analytics page offers the price from the close of business (Third-Party Price) and the current yield to worst and yield to maturity of the offering, as well as risk measures such as duration or option adjusted spread. For Secondary Corporate and Municipal bond details in the Analytics tab, see the Recent Trade field and those directly under it for historical information on the most recent trade price across the US bond market. Note that the Analytics page for a new issue bond will not contain much data due to the lack of available live or historical price information.
You can access the Bond Details pages by:
For Corporate and Municipal bonds, you can view the recent trade history of a particular issue. On the Bond Details Analytics page, the most recent reported trade is displayed. Select View Recent Trades to display the most recent trades (up to 20), and the time, price, and size/quantity of each trade. As all dealers are required by FINRA (for Corporate and GSE/Agency bonds) and the MSRB (for Municipal bonds) to report all recent bond trades, the trades listed are trades that occurred across the U.S. bond market. This information is in the public domain, and Fidelity provides a real-time display as a service for its customers.
TRACE stands for Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine. It is owned and maintained by FINRA over the counter secondary market transactions in eligible fixed income securities.