IHS Markit bond pricing: composite quotes for corporate bonds (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

The Markit Bond Pricing Database is a licensed commercial dataset (IHS Markit, now part of S&P Global Market Intelligence), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no IHS Markit / S&P Global credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Markit Bond Pricing (the Markit Bond Pricing Database, IHS Markit / S&P Global Market Intelligence) provides daily evaluated composite price quotes for individual corporate and other bonds, aggregated from contributing dealers, together with the count of distinct dealers contributing a quote per bond per day. Note: Markit’s single-name CDS spreads, Markit Securities Finance (securities lending), and Markit quanto forwards are separate products documented under their own slugs and are not covered here. Used in, for example Huang, Nozawa & Shi (daily trader quotes and the number of dealers quoting each bond, used as a dealer-meeting-intensity proxy), and Siriwardane, Sunderam & Wallen (Markit cash-bond and CDS pricing for the CDS-bond basis).

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: IHS Markit / S&P Global Market Intelligence.
• Coverage: cross-market corporate and credit bonds; daily composite quotes; history depending on the feed, with deeper history for investment-grade names.

Access (when licensed)

• Directly from IHS Markit / S&P Global. The common path is a data-feed or file-delivery agreement with IHS Markit / S&P Global, keyed on bond identifiers (ISIN or CUSIP).
• Through an institutional data-services agreement. Some universities and asset managers reach Markit products under a broader data-services arrangement with S&P Global; confirm whether your institution’s agreement covers the Bond Pricing feed specifically.
• Credentials and a signed license are required in all cases. Keep them in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Composite quotes, not executed trades. These are dealer-contributed evaluated prices, not transaction prices from TRACE. Quotes can be stale or thin where few dealers contribute; for trade-level data you need TRACE (FINRA).
• Dealer-count is contribution, not depth. The field reflects how many dealers submitted a quote that day; it is not a direct measure of market depth or trading volume, and it is bursty around month-ends and holidays.
• Bond-identifier linking is a separate, imperfect step. Joining ISIN or CUSIP to FISD (Fixed Income Securities Database) issuer, rating, or maturity fields requires a separate linking table; match rates are imperfect, and idiosyncratic re-issuances or identifier changes can drop bonds silently.
• Coverage and quote frequency vary by bond and era. Off-the-run, high-yield, or small-issue bonds receive fewer contributing quotes; absence of a quote on a given day is not absence of a bond from the universe.
• Do not conflate with other Markit products. Markit CDS (single-name spreads), Markit Securities Finance (securities lending), and Markit iBoxx indices are separate products with separate licenses; mixing feeds or assuming a single license covers all Markit data is a common error.
• Evaluated-price methodology can change across vintages. The aggregation method (trimming, weighting of dealer quotes) can differ across feed versions; pin the feed version in your data dictionary and flag any vintage breaks in the sample period.

Citation

Cite the product and vendor, stating the feed version and the bond-identifier link used, e.g.: Markit Bond Pricing Database, IHS Markit / S&P Global Market Intelligence, data licensed and accessed YYYY-MM-DD; bonds linked via CUSIP/ISIN to FISD. State the sample period, quote frequency, and how you handle bond-days with no contributing quote.