Every corporate bond has a price. Almost nobody connects that price to the whole story behind the company.
Proposal — not yet builtCredit Tape would track the two things anyone trading junk bonds wants to see: how a company raised a bond — straight from the filing it submits to the SEC, with the coupon, maturity, size, and rating at the time of sale — and how that bond is trading right now, from FINRA's public tape, the government-mandated public record of nearly every corporate bond trade executed in the US.
The issuance side is built the same way the rest of MARS is: straight from the SEC filing, nothing resold. The trading-price side rests on a genuine public mandate — FINRA trade reporting is public by law — but what it costs to access at the scale and freshness a real product needs is still being confirmed before we build on it.
This isn't a new database. It's a new layer on the one that already exists. Every company in MARS already has one true identity — tied to its SEC registration and ticker, its executives, its funding history, its lawsuits, its private lending record. A bond doesn't start from zero; it lands on a record that's already deep.
A bond for a given company shows up on that company's existing MARS record automatically — not a separate lookup, not a separate spreadsheet to reconcile against the rest of what MARS already knows.
MARS already tracks when private lenders quietly mark down a company's loan. Pairing that with a falling public bond price produces a much louder warning than either signal does on its own — and nobody else can see both halves at once.
Every MARS data point already carries a quality grade — verified, supported, or flagged. Bond data would inherit the same discipline, so a client always knows exactly how solid a given number is, instead of taking it on faith.
Every company whose bonds sold off hardest this week — with the likely reason (earnings, a downgrade, a lawsuit) pulled straight from that company's own MARS record.
Every junk-rated company with bonds maturing in the next 12 months, ranked by how much cash it actually has on hand to refinance with.
Companies already marked down by a private lender and sliding in public bond trading — a compounding signal that only exists because both datasets live in the same graph.
The official paperwork a company files with the SEC every time it sells bonds to the public — coupon, maturity, size, covenants, and the credit rating at the time of sale.
FINRA's trade-reporting mandate — the government-required public record of nearly every corporate bond trade in the US, including price and size. Access terms for current, bulk-scale data are being verified.
No paywalled ratings subscription, and the filing side is never resold. The FINRA trading-price side rests on a genuine public-disclosure mandate rather than a reseller markup — but what it costs to access at product scale is being verified before any price-point claim is made.