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Contact: Jennifer A. Galloway, Chief Communications Officer 
            (703) 797-6600
             jgalloway@msrb.org

MSRB LAUNCHES NEW TOOL ON EMMA® TO IMPROVE INVESTOR ACCESS
TO MUNICIPAL SECURITIES PRICING INFORMATION

Alexandria, VA – In a significant enhancement to the transparency of municipal bond prices for retail investors, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) today launched a new electronic tool to help users more quickly and easily gauge the trade price of a municipal bond.

Investors can use a new price discovery tool on the MSRB’s Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA®) website to assess the potential value of municipal securities that trade infrequently by finding recent trade prices of municipal securities with similar characteristics. The EMMA website also now allows investors to see the price at which the same bond has been bought or sold using a new graphing capability.

“EMMA’s new price discovery tool offers an important new resource for investors who may find it challenging to get a sense of the current price of a security that has not traded recently,” said MSRB Executive Director Lynnette Kelly. “This tool will arm investors with useful information when they go to their financial professional to buy or sell a bond.”

The MSRB’s EMMA website serves as the official source of free trade data and disclosure documents on more than 1.1 million outstanding municipal securities. The price discovery tool, available for each security on EMMA, is a one-click way to find other securities that share key characteristics, including maturity date, interest rate, state and other features. Users can then select up to five matching securities to view a side-by-side comparison of their prices and yields or to chart their price trends over time. 

Watch a video about how to use EMMA’s price discovery tool.

The MSRB has also enhanced the display of trade data throughout the EMMA website. Improvements include:

  • A new graphical summary of the daily high and low price for every municipal security on EMMA
  • A graph of each security’s trade prices over time to help users visualize historical trade prices for a single bond
  • A grid display of trade data for individual securities that provides a daily summary of trade prices, yield, principal amount and other trade information

“Making trade data more accessible and visual for investors is a significant step forward for market transparency,” Kelly said. “The price discovery tool and recent enhancements to the display of trade data on EMMA will help investors explore available trade data and make more informed decisions.”

The MSRB will host a webinar tour of the new price discovery tool and related enhancements on Thursday, June 19, 2014 from 3:00 p.m. EST – 4:00 p.m. EST. Register for the webinar.

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) protects and strengthens the municipal bond market, enabling access to capital, economic growth, and societal progress in tens of thousands of communities across the country. The MSRB fulfills this mission by creating trust in our market through informed regulation of dealers and municipal advisors that protects investors, issuers and the public interest; building technology systems that power our market and provide transparency for issuers, institutions, and the investing public; and serving as the steward of market data that empowers better decisions and fuels innovation for the future. The MSRB is a self-regulatory organization governed by a board of directors that has a majority of public members, in addition to representatives of regulated entities. The MSRB is overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress.

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