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America's bond markets are due for scrutiny--and competition
CURIOUSLY, bonds were the first products traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) back in 1792. It took the exchange 30 years to put the "stock" in its name. The exchange lost any significant stake in the bond business generations ago. Now, though, caught in a war over the cost of trading shares, the NYSE quite rightly is looking at other markets with fatter spreads. And its attention has settled on old haunts. It has begun talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over permission to trade thousands of unlisted corporate bonds.
The obvious attraction of the bond market is its size: some $10 trillion-worth of corporate bonds traded in 2003, a quarter more than the trading volume on the NYSE. And yet the bond market's size and maturity ought to mean that there are no rich pickings left. It has been hard, though, to tell how efficient bond markets are. In contrast to equities, information on the price of dealing in bonds has been scarce.
That began to change two years ago when the National Association of Securities Dealers began collecting transaction prices. This month the SEC released a study, based on these data, by its own Amy Edwards and Michael Piwowar, and Lawrence Harris of the University of Southern California. For all but the largest investors, trading bonds is many times more expensive than trading stocks. This is odd. In theory bonds should be no more expensive to trade than equities.
Even before sales commissions, the spread between what investors receive when selling $20,000-worth of corporate bonds and what they pay when buying is about 1.4%, or about one-quarter of a year's return. Costs are still higher in the convertible-bond market. And in the municipal-bond market, the spread reaches 2%, according to a similar study published by the SEC in the summer. All told, this is at least four