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Smart Bond Investing
Reading a Corporate Bond Table |
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Reading a Corporate Bond Table
Unlike stocks, the bond prices you see online or in the newspaper are not the actual dollar prices. They're really percentages of a bond's par value (usually $1,000). A corporate bond quoted at 99.2 is actually 99.2% of $1,000, which makes the price $992. The easiest procedure for arriving at a bond's price is to simply move the decimal point one position to the right.
Most Active Investment Grade Bonds
| Issuer Name |
Symbol |
Coupon |
Maturity |
Rating
Moody's/S&P |
High |
Low |
Last |
Change |
Yield % |
| AT&T WIRELESS SERVICES |
AWE.GB |
7.875% |
Mar 2011 |
Baa2/-- |
118.055 |
117.797 |
118.032 |
0.017 |
4.445 |
Header: Type of bond. In this case, investment-grade corporate.
Column 1: Issuer Name—The entity that issued the bond.
Column 2: Symbol—FINRA trading symbol that identifies the individual issue.
Column 3: Coupon—The stated interest rate that the issuer pays to the bondholder. This rate can be fixed or variable depending on the structure of the bond.
Column 3: Maturity—The date on which the bond's issuer will pay back the principal value to the bondholder. In some charts, only the last two digits of the year are quoted: for example, 20 means 2020, 06 is 2006.
Column 4: Rating—The credit rating from a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) that is an assessment of the creditworthiness of the issuer and likelihood of its default, which impacts its ability to pay a bond's principal and interest.
Column 5: High—The intraday (if real-time) or previous day's highest price at which the bond traded. Prices below 100 are trading at a discount to par, and those above 100 are trading at a premium to par.
Column 6: Low—The intraday (if real-time) or previous day's lowest price at which the bond traded. Prices below 100 are trading at a discount to par, and those above 100 are trading at a premium to par.
Column 7: Last—The intraday (if real-time) or previous day's most recent or last price at which the bond traded. Prices below 100 are trading at a discount to par, and those above 100 are trading at premium to par.
Column 8: % Change—Change in price from the previous price at which the bond traded.
Column 9: % Yield—The annual percentage rate of return an investor will receive until the bond is called (Yield-to-Call or YTC) or matures (Yield-to-Maturity or YTM). YTM is commonly used. However, the Yield-to-Worst (YTW), which is the lower of the YTC or YTM, is also used frequently. When a bond is trading at a premium (above 100), a bond's yield is less than its coupon. When a bond is trading at a discount (below 100), the bond's yield is more than its coupon.
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