In a move that aims to shed more light on the opaque municipal bond market, inter-broker dealer Hartfield, Titus & Donnelly LLC recently made its HTDonline service available on a subscription basis to non-customers. In the past, the service was only available to trading customers of the 40-year-old firm.
The service is based on the data generated through our brokering activity, and provides access to individuals who are not our trading customers and are not in our traditional client base, which have been the registered broker dealer firms of all sizes, said Jay Caldas, a managing director at HTDonline LLC, which is wholly owned by Hartfield, Titus & Donnelly.
The service is marketed to all interested parties, but it should be of particular use to those who directly participate in the tax-exempt bond market, such as a mutual fund manager or an insurance company.
The subscription, which starts at $150 per month, provides access to the same Web-based service that was previously only available to the firms network of broker dealer customers.
In addition to information, the Web site also offers trading capabilities for broker-dealers registered with the National Association of Securities Dealers who are customers of the firm. Non-broker dealers who subscribe to the HTDonline will not be able to trade though the service, but they will have access to the same information.
Among the information that is included in the service is a list of inventory that is available for both sale or purchase, a list of recent sales, historical pricing information on a number of issues, spreads to Municipal Market Data municipal yield curves, and a proprietary bond calculator.
The service also includes an alerts system, which can be tailored to the users liking. For example, if a subscriber wanted to see only the recent trades for Connecticut general obligation bonds with a maturity of five years, he or she could set of the service so that only those trades appeared.
The service is not the only one available, but it is the latest in a broader effort to offer investors more information to help them navigate what has traditionally been an opaque market. In January of this year, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board instituted real-time reporting, which required broker-dealers to report trading prices of municipal bonds within 15 minute of when the trade occurs.
All the information we are providing is out there. MSRB reporting is out there, bids and offers, competitive offerings are all out there, said Caldas. What we are looking to do is sell a service that provides and organizes that information and aids in the transparency of the municipal market. What we have created is a service that is a byproduct of our extensive brokering activities.
