How to Find Individual Bonds Online
Online investors can buy individual bonds using a mainstream online broker, that let investors buy bonds directly from the borrowers. They can also deal directly with brokers that specialize in bonds. Finding and buying an individual bond online is very similar to finding and buying an individual stock. It’s up to you to find the bonds that have what you’re looking for in terms of risk and reward.
Online tools can help you find bonds that fit your needs. You can use various bond screening tools, which let you define characteristics of a bond you’d like to find. The bond screener then cross-checks what you’re looking for in a bond against its database of available bonds. A few bond screeners that can help you quickly find bonds you’re interested in include the following:
Yahoo! Finance’s Bond Screener: Yahoo!’s bond screener first asks you whether you’re interested in buying a Treasury, a zero-coupon Treasury, a corporate security, or a municipal security. (If you’re looking for a municipal bond, you can also indicate what state you’re interested in.) You can narrow your search by other factors, ranging from the bond’s price, coupon, yield to maturity, and credit rating.
After you enter what you’re looking for, click the Find Bonds button to get a list of all the bonds that meet your standards. Click a bond and write down the name of the issuer, coupon, and maturity date. You need this information to buy the bond.
Zions Direct’s Bond Center: The Zions Direct site provides a full-fledged screener that lets you be even more specific about what you’re looking for in a bond. You can filter not only on muni bonds and Treasuries but also on high-yield, investment-grade, and agency bonds.
Just click the button for the type of bond you’re interested in, wait for a page to appear, and then enter all your search criteria into the appropriate text fields. When you’re done, click the Search button, and you see the list of bonds that make your cut. Write down the name of the issuer, coupon, and maturity date.
Online brokers’ sites: Most of the large online brokers—including Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD AMERITRADE, and E*TRADE—provide bond-screening tools on their sites. Check with your online broker to see whether it has a feature that lets you screen for fixed-income securities.
Bond screeners tell you what the all-important yield to maturity of a bond is. This is a great tip because it saves you and your calculator the hassle of measuring the yield to maturity yourself.
Online Investing Glossary
60 percent margin requirement
The requirement that you must put up 60 cents of every $1 you invest.
Online Investing Glossary
annual report to shareholders
A document that contains all the required financial statements and information contained in the 10-Ks presented in a colorful format.
Online Investing Glossary
average daily share volume
The number of shares that usually trade hands in a given day.
Online Investing Glossary
balance sheet
A document that tells you what a company owns and what it owes.
Online Investing Glossary
bond
An IOU issued by a government, a company, or another borrower.
Online Investing Glossary
brokerage
A fee paid to a broker to handle investment transactions for you.
Online Investing Glossary
capital gains
Income you’ve made on the capital you’ve invested.
Online Investing Glossary
cash account
A brokerage account into which you deposit cold hard cash your broker uses to buy stocks for you.
Online Investing Glossary
commission
The price brokers charge for executing trades.
Online Investing Glossary
Consumer Price Index
The measure of how much prices for the things individuals buy are changing.
Online Investing Glossary
days to cover
The number of days it would take, on average, for the number of shares that are being shorted to trade.
Online Investing Glossary
diversifying
To spread your risk over a wide swath of investments.
Online Investing Glossary
dividend yield
The amount of return you’re getting in the form of a dividend, in other words, how big the dividend is relative to what you’ve invested.
Online Investing Glossary
dividends
Cash payments made by companies to their investors.
Online Investing Glossary
earnings reports
A document that tells you how much the company made during the quarter. Earnings reports also contain all the vital financial results for the quarter, including the net income (or total profit) as well as earnings per share, which is how much of the company’s profit you can lay claim to as a shareholder.
Online Investing Glossary
Exchange Traded Funds; ETFs
Groups of stocks, much like mutual funds, that trade like stocks.
Online Investing Glossary
geometric mean
The way to correctly measure stock return.
Online Investing Glossary
holding period
The length of time you hold a stock.
Online Investing Glossary
income statement
A document that outlines how much money a company made.
Online Investing Glossary
limit orders
Trades in which you set the price you’re willing to accept.
Online Investing Glossary
maintenance margin
The percentage of ownership of stocks relative to what has been borrowed (typically 30 percent or higher at most firms) most online brokers require investors to maintain.
Online Investing Glossary
margin account
An account type that lets you borrow money you can use to buy stocks.
Online Investing Glossary
mutual funds
Money collected from many investors and used to invest in a basket of assets.
Online Investing Glossary
number of shares outstanding
The number of shares that are in the hands of investors.
Online Investing Glossary
options
If you own an option, you have the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an investment, including shares of stock by a certain preset time in the future.
Online Investing Glossary
penny stocks
Stocks that trade for less than a dollar.
Online Investing Glossary
Producer Price Index
Tracks prices paid by companies that create goods. When prices are rising, both bond and stock investors pay attention because that affects the value of their investments. Stock investors typically don’t like inflation because it drives up costs and makes their investments worth less.
Online Investing Glossary
proxy statement
A document that describes company matters to be discussed and voted on by shareholders at the annual meeting.
Online Investing Glossary
shareholders’ equity
The difference between assets and liabilities is what portion of the company shareholders own, called.
Online Investing Glossary
short squeeze
What happens when the short sellers get nervous that a stock they’re betting against will rise and they rush out and buy the stock back so that they can return it to the brokers they borrowed it from.
Online Investing Glossary
taxable accounts
The standard accounts that come to mind when you think about investing online.
Online Investing Glossary
tax-advantaged accounts
Accounts that are sheltered in some way for some period or other from the Internal Revenue Service.
Online Investing Glossary
total return
The amount a stock has gone up plus its dividend.
Online Investing Glossary
turnover
The amount of buying and selling a fund does.
Online Investing Glossary
valuation ratios
An estimation a stock’s value computed by comparing the stock price with a measure taken from the company’s financial statements.
Online Investing Glossary
volume
A measure of how many times shares of a stock or ETF trade hands.
