WASHINGTON — The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board on Tuesday announced it has made some improvements to EMMA, launching end-of-day trade alerts for users, and improving its market statistics.
The new trade alerts notify investors, who have designated certain muni bonds they want to follow, with end-of-day emails when those bonds trade. The alerts show the CUSIP numbers of the bonds and include links to screens on the EMMA platform where users can see the details of their trade history and pricing.
“The ability for investors to receive notifications about individual bond transactions will bring a new level of transparency to the municipal market. Automatic alerts about the price at which specific bonds trade provides information investors can use in their decision making,” MSRB executive director Lynnette Kelly said in a statement.
The board also announced changes to its document alert system. In the past, the system emailed users, who signed up for alerts, each time any of a host of disclosure documents were filed with the MSRB.
The system now allows users to receive all the alerts, or to specify which types they wish to receive. They can ask to receive alerts for primary market documents, such as official statements, continuing disclosure documents, including material event notices and annual financial statements, or variable-rate security documents.
“EMMA already sends investors alerts when disclosure documents such as ratings changes or financial statements are filed with the MSRB by municipal securities issuers. Investors can now specify whether they want to receive financial- or event-based disclosures, or both,” the board said in its release.
Users can receive notifications on up to 50 individual securities and can track up to 15,000 CUSIP numbers using the MSRB’s group alert system.
The board is also providing more market statistics by replacing summary pie charts with line graphs showing trade activity over time. The graphs, which can be customized with any date range, display changes in par amounts and average daily trades, broken out by customer sales, customer purchases and inter-dealer transactions.
The changes are some of the first upgrades of EMMA announced by the MSRB since it released its long-term transparency plan last week. The plan lays out a vision for a major overhaul of the board’s web-based information systems, the core of which is EMMA 2.0, with the goal of increasing transparency in the muni market.
On Monday, the MSRB announced the launch of EMMA Mobile, a website designed specifically to be access by users of smartphones.
