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We’ve expanded our coverage today to include a number of topics our customers have been requesting to help them with their fixed income investing.

There are two major new areas covered

- Municipal bonds – this includes adding research on the bonds themselves, government infrastructure plans which are critical for modeling the risk on the bonds, municipal budget activity and job and employment trends – all tagged by state so you can just see research for the states you are interested in. In addition, we already have significant real estate coverage and so we’re tying that into the real estate impact on the tax base. More later – but we’ve introduced FirstRain content widgets onto http://ignite.firstrain.com/ for the first time and you can see samples of the type of data we’re finding in the Municipal Credit Crisis box.

- Corporate debt – this includes our usual coverage of companies and markets, but now extended to include the topics that would impact the risk of the bonds and convertible securities.

The second area is a new trend for many traditional equity investors. They wouldn’t have invested in corporate debt in the past but there is a new combination of events making it compelling. We have a number of hedge fund clients who look at the volatility of the equities markets and then compare them to the relative security – and significant rates of return like 15%+ available on some converts. Given that comparison – 15% from a senior convertible note or a crap shoot investing in the stock they understandably want to get research to help them decide on the risk profile of the convert. (If you are a Cadence employee/investor the Cadence converts are good examples of this trade off).

So if you have interest in the fixed income market and what original research is coming from the web check out the new FirstRain web site or read the press release here.

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