FINRA’s Academic Corporate Bond TRACE Data Product Goes Live

WASHINGTON — FINRA today launched its new Academic Corporate Bond TRACE Data product, an enhanced historical data product available solely to institutions of higher education.

The product supports and encourages academic research on corporate bonds by providing academics with access to TRACE historical transaction-level, corporate bond data. The data is available on a 36-month delayed basis and include masked identifying information regarding the dealer reporting each transaction, as academics have requested. In addition, the product includes a security identifier, execution date and time, price, yield, quantity, commission, buy or sell, and principal or agency capacity. FINRA’s existing Historical TRACE Data product, which will continue to be available, provides transaction-level data on an 18-month delayed basis, but does not include any dealer-identifying information.

“With interest in the fixed-income markets and market design on the rise, the Academic Corporate Bond TRACE Data provides researchers with broad content to investigate issues of interest to market participants and regulators including liquidity provision, search costs, inventory models, price discovery and the treatment of retail orders,” said Jonathan S. Sokobin, FINRA Chief Economist and Senior Vice President. “We believe the product will lead to research that increases understanding of these important markets.”

The cost for the data is $500 per calendar year, plus a one-time set-up fee of $500. In addition, subscribers must sign an agreement specifying that they will not re-distribute the data or attempt to reverse engineer the identity of any market participant, among other requirements.

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