Lessons from Developing the Yield Book

Abstract

The Yield Book is an X-based front end to Salomon’s research and analytics. It is used by sales, trading, and research at Salomon, by institutional fixed-income investors, and by selected (noncompeting) regional dealers to analyze fixed income securities and portfolios. Its development, both in the literal sense as software and in the management sense as an institution within a broker-dealer, has coincided with the trend toward greater automation that is evident in, say, robotic automobile manufacture, automated banking and electronic trading, and with the trend toward easier and cheaper access to all kinds of information that was either completely unavailable outside small circles or very expensive.