About BondPage

BondPage is Reuters Fixed Income Services's Internet browser version of our financial applications. With instant access to more than one million securities, BondPage is your easy link to the vast Reuters Fixed Income Services warehouse of premium-quality taxable fixed income data, valuations, and analytics.

We welcome your feedback! Please call your Reuters Fixed Income Services sales representative (1-800-REUTERS) with questions and comments, or go to our Customer Support Zone.

BondPage features

There are two versions of BondPage: Basic and Basic with Open Data. We are providing all features during the evaluation period. See About the evaluation version for details.

Basic version

The basic version of BondPage is accessible to anyone who can access a World Wide Web page. With the basic version of BondPage, you have access to:

Data and Valuations
- Full security descriptions (over 350 data fields, including complete schedules)
- Search the Reuters Fixed Income Services database using your own criteria.
- End-of-day prices with real-time updates.
- Market Summaries.
- Historical information.
Analytics
- Price and yield analyses.
- Cash flow vectors.
- Risk measures such as duration and convexity.
- Option-adjusted-spread models.

Open data version

The optional open data version of BondPage is for Reuters Fixed Income Services customers who have a Reuters Fixed Income Services data license. With the open data version of BondPage, in addition to the features listed for the basic version, you can:

Create reports and extract data.
Create a "hotlist" of bonds you use frequently. For more on using hotlists, click here.

About the evaluation version

If you already have a Reuters Fixed Income Services data license, you are allowed to extract data for use anywhere within your firm. If you do not have a Reuters Fixed Income Services data license, you can use the optional open data features during this period, but you are not contractually permitted to download Reuters Fixed Income Services data from your PC (or UNIX workstation) to another machine.

How to get a login ID

Contact your Reuters Fixed Income Services sales representative to get a login ID. We typically assign your full e-mail address (such as jsmith@reuters.com) as your login ID. Login IDs are limited to 256 characters. The password must be 8 characters or fewer. Your account will be available a few hours after you are notified that your request was approved. In a future release, you'll be able to modify your password from BondPage.

This page works only with a browser that supports frames

Reuters Fixed Income Services's BondPage uses many advanced browser features. It has been tested extensively on the Netscape Navigator 2.0 and up and works well. The Microsoft Internet Explorer V3.0 works with most functions, but does not support uploading files (as of March, 1997).

Adjusting page rendering

If you find that a page doesn't look quite right, you can adjust it as follows:

UNIX/Motif users: Try changing the font's point size. We recommend 10-14 points. If you use a larger point size, resize the browser window so that the data inside the applets does not wrap around.
PC users: Both the resolution of your monitor and the point size affect how BondPage displays. Try adjusting these if the display doesn't look quite right. We have also noticed that there is more line spacing when you run BondPage via Netscape on a PC than on a UNIX workstation. We are examining several alternatives to resolve this issue.
For all platforms, you can adjust the frame size by grabbing the frame bar and resizing the box.

Setting disk and memory cache

Netscape allows you to set disk and memory cache through the Network Preferences command in the Options menu. Set these options to meet your individual preferences. We recommend that you clear the cache at least once a week, and more often if your browser is never killed, so that revised pages will be viewed as intended. To clear the cache, either select the OPTIONS/Network Preferences pulldown or exit your browser and restart it.

Navigation hints

Note that there are several ways to navigate Web pages. Netscape's standard Back and Forward buttons allow you to view the previous and next pages (the number of pages you can go back depends on the size of your cache). You can also page back and forward within an individual frame by clicking the right mouse button in the frame and selecting the option you want.

Connection problems?

If you can't connect to our Web site, one of the following may be the cause:

Your internal LAN connection may not allow for a connection to the public Internet, or the client router is not yet configured for the https "secure" protocol which must be routed through PORT 443.
Your Internet provider does not yet have our Web site registered. (All new Web site addresses (URLs) are broadcast to all Internet providers, but a given provider might have problems with their directory.)
The Reuters Fixed Income Services database is refreshed early each morning (EDT). During the update, the server is not be available. We will publish a more specific time after we gain some experience in running the cycle.

Response time

Response time can vary widely, depending on network traffic and the speed of your circuit. Generally, we find that at 56KB, response time is 2-3 seconds or less. If you access our service through a LAN, slow response time might be caused by a traffic bottleneck between your machine and your firm's gateway server or between that server and the Internet provider that you use. Reuters Fixed Income Services monitors the response time of our web server, and as more customers use our product we will make adjustments as necessary.

To download spreadsheet files directly into MS Excel

Where BondPage provides the option to download a spreadsheet file, the user can easily configure their PC to load this file directly into a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. This feature should theoretically also work with Unix, but our instructions below apply only to the various flavors of Windows. There are two ways to do this (both of which are far easier to do than the instructions are to read):

The easy way is to actually do a report in BondPage and download it. The browser (this feature only works with Netscape 2.0 and greater as of 6/27/96) will display a dialog that shows four buttons: More Info, Pick App, Save File, Cancel. Select Pick App. Netscape will now display a dialog that wants to know the name of the spreadsheet program that you want to use. Assume that you want to use Microsoft Excel, and the exact path to that program is known, you can be enter it now. Otherwise, hit the Browse button to bring up a familiar file dialog from which you can locate the Excel application. Typically, this application is in c:\MSOffice\Excel and will be called Excel.exe. If it is not in this directory, for instance if your programs are located on a network server, you might have to ask a system administrative type to help you locate it.
You can also directly configure the Netscape browser without having to do a report in BondPage. To do this, select the Options menu from Netscape, then select General Preferences. This will result in a tabbed dialog box. You should select Helpers. On the Helpers page, push the Create New Type button. This will display a dialog that wants two strange looking pieces of information: Mime Type and Mime SubType. These are text and csv respectively, which corresponds to the type and subtype that BondPage sends for spreadsheet files. This tells the browser that when a file of this type is requested to do the action we will now define. Hit OK to record these entries. Below leave File Extensions blank, there is no need for it. You should now select Action Launch the Application. Now as above, if you know the path of your spreadsheet, you should type it in directly, or you can hit the Browse button to help you find it.

After performing either of these configurations, whenever you download a spreadsheet file, the selected application will automatically launch and load the requested file.

Using hotlists

BondPage's Hotlist feature allows you to maintain a list of bonds for easy reference. You can only have one active hotlist at a time, but you can save a hotlist on your local machine and upload it to make it the active hotlist at any time. Your active hotlist is stored at the Reuters central server and is secure. Other users can not access your hotlist.

The basics of using hotlists are described here.

To view a hotlist, select View Hotlist
To create (or add to) a hotlist:

Import a list of 8-character CUSIPs by uploading a text file from a directory on your machine. You can create the CUSIP file with any standard word processor or spreadsheet application. You can also supply the amount of each holding using a comma as a separator after the CUSIP. There should be a carriage return at the end of each line. When you upload a file, you can choose to replace the existing hotlist or append the CUSIP list to it.
Select bonds using BondPage's search functions and add them to your hotlist.

To extract Reuters's data, select View Hotlist to display your hotlist. Select the Report/Extract radio button. Next, click the Do Selected Action button. You can then select a pre-defined report format, or create a custom report with columns of your choice.

To select multiple securities from a hotlist:

For Netscape Windows users - Shift-click or drag to select contiguous lines; Control-click to select non-contiguous lines.
For UNIX/Motif users - the normal convention is to click and drag to select contiguous lines, but this does not work under Netscape at this time. You can, however, click on as many individual lines as you want in order to select a group of issues.

Hotlist capacity limitations - while Reuters imposes no limitations on the size of a hotlist that can be stored, there are constraints that are a function of several variables including the hardware, operating system, and browser. Ideally, these limitations will relax as the tools become more mature.

Size of uploaded file. We have determined that for a Win95/NT or Unix system running Netscape 2.0 or higher that the maximum number of securities that can be uploaded at a time is 1500. However, multiple lists can be uploaded and appended to create larger lists. This limit is 670 securities for Win3.1, but sadly is a hard limit to the size of the hotlist also.
Size of extract/report on Win95/NT or Unix, we have extracted reports of over 4000 securities. On Win3.1, the limit is 670 securities.