Welcome to BondVillage! BondVillage is an easy-to-use website designed to be your one-stop financial site for objective, unbiased bond information. Professional investment advisors agree that bonds should be an important part of every investor’s balanced portfolio. Our goal is for you to be a more educated, knowledgeable and profitable bond investor.

The bond market is a large and confusing marketplace. While there are approximately 10,000 listed stocks on the exchanges, there are over five million different bond instruments, each with its own unique characteristics, ratings, yields, maturities, structures and terms. Most investors are unaware of how the bond market works, the sheer number of bonds to chose from and the large inefficiencies in the bond market.

Unlike the stock market (which uses central exchanges like the NYSE or NASDAQ), there are no comparable exchanges or price-reporting mechanism for bonds, leading to significant market inefficiencies in the pricing of bonds. In fact, there are many hundreds of broker/dealers who each set their own price at which they are willing to sell their bonds to individual investors. Prices may vary by up to 5% or more for an identical issue.

Could you imagine calling two brokers for a quote on the price of IBM stock and finding you could buy it for $98/share from one and $103/share from the other. Unimaginable! But, this happens every day in the bond market. In fact, this ‘inefficiency’ has become such a large issue that the House of Representatives recently passed by a vote of 332-to-1 the ‘Bond Price Competition Improvement Act of 1999 – HR 1400’, which calls for increased price transparency in the bond markets. Simply, Congess believes that more information be publicly available on the price of bonds.

How BondVillage Can Help You!

Professional bond investors have a tremendous amount of information and tools at their disposal to navigate this confusing marketplace. Making sense of all this information is the hard part.

Thus, investors are told: "Leave it to the experts". But this should not be the only answer. One should be able to understand how well his or her money is invested, see how well the investments are performing and whether they can be more profitably employed. Fortunately, the Internet provides a forum for leveling the playing field for retail investors and this is proceeding at a rapid pace.

For its part, BondVillage seeks to level the ‘playing field’ for the retail bond investor. As an independent company, we are dedicated to providing absolutely objective and unbiased information. Unlike many brokerage firms, we have no relationship with any of the companies whose bonds we discuss, and never will! Our independence allows us to truly focus on the best investment ideas.

Our objective for developing the site is simple: to help you, the individual investor, by focusing on four major areas:

• Education and Training
• Market Information
• Proprietary Investment Information (using bvPerspectives™ and bvBondSelector™ , explained below)
• Trade Execution (planned for later date)

Education and training materials have been provided to benefit both the new and experienced investor. Market information includes everything from up-to-the minute market updates to weekly outlooks to upcoming Federal Reserve activity to our own exclusive bond yield curves. In addition, links have been provided to other leading sites for additional economic, financial and legislative information. BondVillage will help your investment returns through timely investment ideas supplied by our proprietary bond engine, bvAnalytics™. Convenient trade execution services, where you can place trades through the BondVillage site with your own broker, are to be implemented at a later date.

bvPerspectives

The individual bond investor and even the professional lack an overall perspective of the bond market. Needed is a "bird's eye" view of the bond market. bvPerspectives was developed to provide an overview of the retail bond market available to the individual investor The graphics and underlying tabulated data show how the yields of typical bonds vary with credit rating, issue maturity and the investor’s time frame.

Yields of actual bond issues vary around these typical yields - to a lesser extent with AAA rated bonds but with increasingly greater amounts with reduced credit rating. bvPerspectives provides yield data for credit ratings from Aaa/AAA to B/B. The lowest rated issues, Caa/CCC and lower, although analyzed, are not included here because of their substantial variability and market uncertainties.

bvBondSelector

One guiding principal at BondVillage is to provide practical, ‘actionable’ services to our users. Many bond investors, who were interviewed during the development of BondVillage said to us: ‘OK, I now better understand how the bond market works. Now, give me specific bond investment ideas to discuss with my broker.’ Out of this user feedback was born bvBondSelector, our exclusive system that can be queried to provide exceptional bond investment ideas based upon the user’s needs. At the heart of bvBondSelector is our proprietary bond analytical engine: bvAnalytics. Without getting into detailed mathematical minutia, bvAnalytics analyzes literally thousands of bond issues to identify what we think are the best bond investment ideas, as measured by superior prices and yields in comparison to typical bonds of the same maturity and with comparable or even lower credit ratings. These ideas are immediately actionable through your own individual broker.

Bonds have an important place in every investor’s portfolio. Do your homework on BondVillage and take control of your finances. Happy investing!