Bonding Experience Everything you ever wanted to know about municipal bonds and what they can do for your portfolio in one handy site.
Interested in investing some of your earnings in the municipalbond market, but don't have a clue about how to get started? Inthe ever-changing world of free Internet services, Bonds Online makes sense of thishuge market, helping prospective investors find out what'savailable, what bonds are worth, how to calculate the prices ofbonds and whether investing is worth the effort.
Municipal bonds are issued by state and local governments tounderwrite public projects, and their earnings are usually freefrom federal, state and local taxes, provided you invest in bondsissued by your specific municipal interest. Safe as T-bills andmore powerful than Internet IPOs, munis are popular investmenttools for many small-business owners and individual investors.
Mercer Island, Washington-based Bonds Online provides individualinvestors with access to information to address these issues. Themunicipal securities market is very localized, consisting of 1.5million issues sold by 50,000 municipal issuers with a wide rangeof credit ratings, and traded and underwritten by as many as 2,000securities dealers. By comparison, this represents many times thenumber of issues listed on all U.S. stock exchanges. Individuals,either investing directly or through bond funds, are the largestgroup holding these securities.
Published by 21st Century Municipals Inc., an onlinefixed-income information-services company, Bonds Online bringstogether many sources that supply information to theprofessionals.
The site offers professional advice in its Q&A section, BondProfessor, as well as special sections addressing investmentbasics, bond basics, bond rating definitions, an investors'Bill of Rights and a guide to selecting a broker. The most popularfeature is the Bond Search service, which indexes 12,000 currentbonds of all types.
According to Bonds Online president David Landes, "Aneducated investor is a better investor."
Kurt Samson isa freelance business writer and public relations consultant inAnnapolis, Maryland.
