Looking for pricing information on equities? Check the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. Would you like to know more about options prices? Take a peek at the American Stock Exchange. Need to find prices for U.S. Corporate Bonds? Hmmm ... life just got a little trickier. The U.S. Corporate bond market has always been a challenging area to locate accurate market data. Because corporate bonds are primarily traded in an over-the-counter marketplace instead of on an exchange, prices have not been in public view. Corporate bonds are traded between two parties privately, and often inconsistently. In fact, a very small fraction of bonds makes up a large percentage of the daily trading volume in the market. In addition, corporate bonds have a range of values, depending on the date of maturation and credit rating. To complicate things further, those values are labeled as spreads, or risk premiums over treasury benchmarks, instead of monetary values.
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