FINRA Site Launch Set For Today

WASHINGTON— The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority today plans to formally launch an expansive new Web site that will display real-time pricing and other trade data for government, corporate, and municipal bonds for free, FINRA officials said last week. Geared toward retail investors and billed as a one-stop destination for information on fixed-income securities, the site also will include real-time trade information for mutual funds and equities in addition to bonds. It boasts several features that are not currently offered for free elsewhere online, said Steve Joachim, FINRA’s executive vice president, such as the ability to keep track of the performance of multiple fixed-income securities on a customized “watch list.”Another feature, the site’s muni search engine, will include up to 20 different search options, such as the ability to forage for bonds based on yields, price, callability, putability, and tax status. “Our goal here is specifically to get the best information in investors hands that we can get, and we’re offering the broadest base of information,” Joachim said.Although muni bond trade data is currently offered for free at www.investinginbonds.com, the Web site run by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, that site limits the search options to the state in which the bond are issued, and only shows bonds traded the day the search is run or the previous day — though it does allows visitors several options to sort through the results or check historical data. The muni trade data on the FINRA site is culled from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s real-time pricing system. But the MSRB is not involved in the site, which was instead a joint project between FINRA and Dow Jones MarketWatch. The company helped develop the site and is hosting it for FINRA.FINRA’s launch of the site comes as the Securities and Exchange Commission has urged Congress to consider creating a free online site, similar to the SEC’s Edgar, where muni investors could access primary and secondary market disclosure documents. Joachim said that FINRA’s new site will not include disclosure information, but he left the door open to that in the future.“If retail investors decided it was a really important thing for us to put up there, we could certainly talk about whether that made sense or not,” he said.When NASD, FINRA’s predecessor organization, launched the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine or TRACE system for corporate debt five years ago, the group discovered that 65% of the transactions were for retail trades of under $100,000 in par value, a surprisingly large number, according to Joachim.Still, it was difficult to get real-time data to retail investors, he said. Though NASD ran a corporate bond site exclusively for retail investors, the self-regulator decided the site did not have the broad appeal needed to attract millions of individual investors. “Retail customers probably wouldn’t come on a large scale to a specific, narrowly focused site,” Joachim said. “We wanted to create better visibility for retail customers across the marketplace and ensure that we had high-quality information for the bonds themselves, both corporate and municipal.”Of all the site’s features, Joachim says he’s most proud that it allows visitors to select an issuer and see the stocks and bonds that it offers, as well as SEC filings in the case of corporations. “You can see the range of securities that they offer and then drill down deeper into each one of those,” he said. “So by going in by one issuer, you get a full view of all the activity across that issuer.”FINRA officials said the site has been in the works since January. It will be accessible from the Web site http://cxa.marketwatch.com/finra/MarketData/Default.aspx.