Fixed Income Question individual, investor, because

cjs238

Bought a bond for 94(ask); Ask is now 99 but Bid is 95.52. Is this wide bid-ask spread common with Bond trading on the individual investor level?
Also, what is the best broker was fixed income? (please don’t say Interactive Brokers because it sucked last time I tried it, it froze up; someone on here recommended it)

PalacioHill

Yeah, this is pretty typical. My investment group at school was tagged as a “retail” account and we continually got into arguments with our broker about the quotes we were given.
What size lot were you dealing in? Anything less than $100k is considered an odd-lot, most places.

Analyze_This

Yeah, I’m definitely not doing $100k trades; more like $5k a trade

jim8z3

you should probably be in funds - the bid ask is going to slaughter your returns on trades of that size.

dvilayphet

@cook, or you could wire me 95k to make up the difference

dandman

There are some pretty great ETN’s and ETF’s these days that can provide you varied exposure to credits - but you probably already knew that.
Going to be really tough to get any type of return trading bonds $5k at a time.
Stuff like FLAT, PST/TBT, HYG are nice tools when you can’t efficiently access the markets of the underlying securities! Not that they don’t have their own faults.