Enhancing Data Consistency and Efficiency: SOLVE’s Augmented Quote FTP Feed for Municipal Bonds

April 11, 2025

At SOLVE, we’re always striving to bring meaningful enhancements to the tools and data that power your decision-making in the fixed income market. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of our Augmented Quote Feed for Municipal Bonds, now available via FTP. This new product enhancement is designed to deliver a more complete, consistent, and efficient data set—helping you and your team navigate even the most volatile market conditions with ease.

What is the Augmented Quote Feed?

The Augmented Quote Feed for Municipal Bonds is a new data offering from SOLVE that takes your Market and Parsed data and augments it with calculated values for Price, Yield, and Spread. These are essential metrics for analyzing municipal bonds. The feed fills in missing or incomplete data, ensuring you get a consistent and complete data set for every bond you analyze.

The Augmented Quote Feed provides a complete set of calculated data, including:

• RawColor: The base Market or Parsed value used for calculation.
• Calculated Price: The bond’s price derived from the RawColor.
• Calculated Yields:
  • YTM (Yield to Maturity)
  • YTC (Yield to Call): Only for callable bonds.
  • YTW (Yield to Worst)
  • YAL (Yield to Average Life): For Term Bonds.
  • YTWcfy (Yield to Worst Cashflow Yield): For Term Bonds.

• Calculated Spreads:
  • For Tax-Exempt bonds, spreads are calculated to ICE Muni AAA.
  • For Taxable bonds, spreads are calculated to one or more Treasury OTR benchmark points.

This new feed ensures that you have a comprehensive set of metrics—Price, Yield, and Spread—calculated and ready for use, all from a consistent data structure.

The Importance of Data Consistency and Completeness

In the world of municipal bond trading, data quality and consistency are paramount. Market participants are constantly evaluating bond prices, yields, and spreads to make informed decisions. However, as any seasoned professional knows, gaps in data can significantly hinder decision-making, especially when market conditions change rapidly.

Gaps in data can arise for a variety of reasons—whether due to missing quotes, inconsistent data from different sources, or complex market dynamics. The Augmented Quote Feed is designed to fill those gaps, offering consistent and complete coverage for every bond you analyze.

By delivering a full set of calculated metrics across Price, Yield, and Spread, the feed ensures that even if the raw Market or Parsed quote is sparse, you’ll still receive all the data points you need to make an informed decision. For instance, you can use the Augmented Quote Feed to quickly compare the yields of different bonds or assess the potential risk of a bond in a changing interest rate environment. This enhancement provides value not only when the market is stable, but also when the volatility ramps up, requiring fast and reliable data for decision-making.

Benefits During Market Volatility

Market volatility can present significant challenges for bond traders and analysts. In periods of increased volatility, prices, yields, and spreads can fluctuate rapidly, making it harder to obtain accurate and consistent data. When the market is in flux, even a small gap in data or an inconsistency in quoted values can lead to poor decision-making or missed opportunities. That’s where the Augmented Quote Feed truly shines.

1. Complete Coverage Across Bonds

When the market is volatile, market participants often struggle with incomplete or fragmented data. Raw quotes for certain bonds might be missing key values, such as Price, Yield, or Spread. This can create challenges for traders who need to compare bonds quickly or assess a portfolio’s risk.

With the Augmented Quote Feed, this issue is solved. The feed automatically fills in gaps, ensuring that all of your bonds have a complete set of data for Price, Yield, and Spread. Whether your workflow relies on Market data, Parsed data, or both, this consistency means that you don’t need to worry about missing data points during key moments in volatile markets.

2. Consistent Data for Easier Comparisons

During market swings, quotes from different counterparties or sources may not align, creating confusion when comparing bonds or making investment decisions. This is especially true in municipal bonds, where bond types can differ significantly, and calculation methods can vary.

By delivering a consistent structure of data across all quotes, the Augmented Quote Feed makes it easy to compare bonds directly—without worrying about inconsistencies in data points. Whether you’re comparing yields, analyzing spreads, or assessing bond prices, having uniform data makes the comparison process faster, more reliable, and less error-prone.

3. Speeding Up Decision-Making

Volatile markets require quick decision-making, but delayed access to data can slow down your workflow. When data needs to be recalculated manually, or when there are discrepancies in how different sources report bond metrics, decision-making becomes slower and more difficult. This can result in missed opportunities or increased risk exposure.

The Augmented Quote Feed removes the need for manual calculations. With key metrics like Price, Yield, and Spread pre-calculated and consistently delivered, your team can focus on analyzing the data instead of spending time recalculating or verifying it. In fast-moving markets, speed is crucial, and the Augmented Quote Feed gives you the agility to make quicker, more informed decisions.

4. More Accurate Risk Assessment

Volatility often brings heightened risk, and accurate risk assessment becomes even more critical. Yield calculations, such as Yield to Worst (YTW) or Yield to Call (YTC), are essential for assessing risk in volatile environments. However, in some cases, these calculations might not be readily available in the raw data you receive.

With the Augmented Quote Feed, all key yield calculations are automatically provided. This enables you to more accurately assess risk by understanding potential worst-case scenarios, as well as how callable bonds might behave in a changing interest rate environment. The ability to calculate YTW, YTM, and other yield metrics on-the-fly ensures you’re equipped to make more informed risk decisions, even when the market is unpredictable.

5. Streamlining Complex Workflows

Bond data analysis often involves comparing various metrics across different securities. With the Augmented Quote Feed, you can quickly assess key metrics such as YTW, YTC, and Yield to Average Life without needing to manually adjust or recalculate them. This streamlining of your workflow reduces the chances of error and improves the overall speed of your analysis.

In periods of market volatility, when every second counts, having these calculations readily available means you can focus on what matters most: evaluating market conditions and making data-driven decisions.

The Bigger Picture: Solving Data Gaps for Municipal Bond Market Participants

The introduction of the Augmented Quote Feed is part of SOLVE’s ongoing commitment to providing the most comprehensive, reliable, and actionable data to our clients. As market conditions evolve, the need for consistency, completeness, and speed only grows. By offering a data feed that automatically fills gaps and provides a full set of calculated values, we’re empowering bond market participants to make smarter, faster decisions—whether the market is stable or experiencing heightened volatility.

Whether you’re managing a bond portfolio, analyzing risk, or simply seeking reliable data to normalize quotes across counterparties, the Augmented Quote Feed ensures that you have the consistent and complete data you need to navigate even the most uncertain market conditions.

Ready to Leverage the Augmented Quote Feed?

If you’re ready to start utilizing the Augmented Quote Feed for Municipal Bonds, contact us today to learn more about how this new enhancement can improve your workflow. With the Augmented Quote Feed, you’ll be equipped with the data consistency and accuracy you need to stay ahead—no matter the market conditions.

As we continue to innovate, stay tuned for more product enhancements designed to keep you on the cutting edge of municipal bond analysis and trading.

About SOLVE

SOLVE is the leading market data platform provider for Fixed Income securities, trusted by sophisticated buy-side and sell-side firms worldwide. Founded in 2011, SOLVE leverages its AI-driven technology and deep industry expertise to offer unparalleled transparency into markets, reduce risk, and save hundreds of hours across front-office workflows. With the largest real-time datasets for Securitized Products, Municipal Bonds, Corporate Bonds, Syndicated Bank Loans, Convertible Bonds, CDS, and Private Credit, SOLVE empowers clients to transform the way they bring new securities to market, trade on secondary markets, and value highly illiquid securities. Headquartered in New York, with offices across the globe, SOLVE is the definitive source for market pricing in Fixed Income markets. For more information, visit https://solvefixedincome.com.