Revolutionary Corporate Bond Indices Launched by Bloomberg

Investment Grade, High Yield Market Benchmarks to Aid Retail Investors;
First Indices Generated from Actual Transaction Data for Active Bonds

Washington, D.C. – As part of its effort to demystify the corporate bond market and make it truly accessible to retail investors, NASD announced today that NASD and Bloomberg are jointly launching two unique, unprecedented corporate bond indices – powerful tools that investors can use on a daily basis to gauge overall market direction and to measure the performance of their corporate bond holdings against the broader market.

The NASD-Bloomberg Active Investment Grade US Corporate Bond Index and the NASD-Bloomberg Active High Yield US Corporate Bond Index are the first and only corporate bond indices generated solely from the actual transaction prices of actively traded bonds – not on quotes or estimated prices. That transaction data is derived from NASD's TRACE (Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine), which collects and publicly disseminates transaction data on 100 percent of over-the-counter activity in the entire universe of more than 30,000 corporate bonds. TRACE disseminates price and volume data on approximately 22,000 transactions every day - representing approximately $18 billion in volume every day.