Munifacts

What Is Munifacts?

Munifacts was a private newswire communication service for municipal bonds which provided information on new municipal bond issues in the primary market and secondary market. In 1996, it was renamed Thomson Municipal News, then later folded into The Municipal Market Monitor (TM3), a subscription service available from Refinitiv.

Understanding Munifacts

Though Munifacts no longer exists, it's replacement service is of interest to municipal bond traders. It is a reporting service traders use to analyze bond issues, including the terms included in the bond's indenture and financial information used to assess the quality of an issue. A 14-day free trial is available for TM3, and subscriptions are available for municipal market participants, who must first be verified by TM3 Client Services personnel in a telephone interview.

Elements of TM3

The news is provided by Refintiv formerly Thomson Municipal News (or, Munifacts) and The Bond Buyer top stories. Tools include an analyst directory and a glossary. Useful tools for traders such as deal and Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures search functions and a bond calculator.

The dashboard shows the Top 5 Competitive Issues, Top 5 Negotiated issues, and 5 Most Active Trades at Volume. Other services available from the dashboard are links to MuniStatements, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Swap Index, and Exchange Traded Funds Index.

The main features of The Municipal Market Monitor are:

• News
• Municipal market data
• Primary & secondary markets
• Muni/data analysis
• Variable Rate Demand Notice network

Tables on the dashboard include MIG1 and MMD Scales. MIG is a Moody’s rating scale to measure municipal bond risk and issuer creditworthiness. The Moody's ratings are one through four, with a one (MIG 1) representing the highest quality and a four (MIG 4) representing the lowest quality.

A proprietary yield curve Municipal Market Data (MMD) AAA Curve provides the offer-side of AAA-rated state general obligation bonds (GO). The MMD analyst team determines the inclusion of bonds. The MMD AAA curve represents the MMD analyst team’s opinion of AAA valuation, based on an institutional block size of $2 million-plus market activity in both the primary and secondary municipal bond market.

The AAA scale is published by Municipal Market Data every day at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time with earlier indications of market movement provided throughout the trading day.

In the interest of transparency, MMD publishes extensive yield curve assumptions relating to various structural criteria, which are used in filtering market information for the purpose of benchmark yield curve creation.