MARS Platform · Product Concept

Credit Tape

Every corporate bond has a price. Almost nobody connects that price to the whole story behind the company.

Proposal — not yet built
Junk bonds are back in the headlines — tight spreads, a wave of debt coming due, companies refinancing at rates far higher than when they first borrowed. The people asking about it want to know who's actually at risk, not just where a yield number sits today.

A credit desk that already knows who the company is

Credit 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.

Nothing here comes from a resold data license. It's built the same way the rest of MARS is: straight from the filing, or straight from the public record.

How it's different

The way it's done today

  • A bond price or yield, by itself, on a terminal screen
  • Licensed from a reseller — Bloomberg, ICE, a ratings agency — expensive, and resold
  • No link to anything else happening at the company
  • Public bond data and private lending data sit in two industries that never talk to each other

Credit Tape

  • A bond's price shown next to the company's full MARS record
  • Sourced directly from SEC filings and FINRA's public tape — nothing resold
  • Every bond lands on a record that already has funding history, M&A, executives, lawsuits
  • Private lending stress and public bond stress, on the same company, for the first time

Built on the graph MARS already has

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.

One company SEC ticker + CIK Bond issuance & trading — new Funding rounds M&A history Private lending Bankruptcies Lawsuits Executives
a bond lands on a record that's already this connected
01

No second identity system

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.

02

A ready-made stress signal

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.

03

A trust score on every number

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.

What you could ask it

“Who moved this week?”

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.

“Who's walking into a wall?”

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.

“Who's stressed twice?”

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.

Where it comes from

Source one

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.

Source two

FINRA's public trade tape — the government-required public record of nearly every corporate bond trade in the US, including price and size.

No resold data. No paywalled ratings subscription. The same sourcing discipline as the rest of MARS — which is also why it can reach a different price point than the incumbents.