Where to Find Bond Prices?

While a quick online search would return many results for the historical and current pricing data for stocks and mutual, the process of finding bond prices is less straightforward. Unlike stocks which are largely traded on exchanges, bonds are mostly traded over the counter via phone calls with brokers. For bond investors who do not have direct access to real-time financial data services such as Bloomberg Terminal, which are often used by analysts or finance professionals in sales and trading, the main source of their bond pricing data would come from their brokers.

Bond brokers may take advantage of the lack of price transparency in the bond market to markup bond prices and profit from the spread between the buy and sell transaction price. As a result, investors who call their brokers for bond price information often receive on a delayed basis a quoted price that includes the brokers’ commission fee and markup of a few basis points. This leaves many investors unclear over whether the price they are given is fair.

Investors seeking to find the price of a bond themselves may use bond-tracking websites. Sites such as Bloomberg, Reuters, or Morningstar publish government bond prices and yields, which are publicly available. However, insights on corporate bond pricing is more limited and not easily accessible. Investors may need to provide the specific bond International Securities Identification Number (ISIN). While it is also possible to use bond information such as the issuer, coupon, issue date, maturity date and issue size when searching for bond prices, investors must be careful as two separate ISINs with different prices can have very similar bond information.

The rise of bond information service platforms such as the BondEvalue app has increased the accessibility of bond price data, especially buy and sell price and yields, to investors, and has provided valuable insights such as duration, accrued interest, spread to its users.