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Municipal Bonds

Filed in: FINRA Exam, Securities Training, Series 7

Series7YT

What follows is a transcript of the video above.

Let’s try a practice question:

The Call provisions of municipal issuer would be most completely detailed in?

  1. The bond resolution.
  2. The official note of sale.
  3. The legal opinion.
  4. The Bond Buyer

The correct answer here is 1.

The Bond Resolution

The bond resolution is a document that authorizes the bond issuance of a municipal bond, with its features and responsibilities. The bond resolution for municipal bond is like the prospectus for a registered/corporate bond. It’s the disclosure document, it helps explain all those pieces.

Official Notice of Sale.

This has to do with legal opinion. The notice of sale is from issuer to investment banks to see who wants to underwrite/sell the bond. The bond resolution is like an official statement. The legal opinion is the interest that will be the legal debt of the issuer and tax free. The issuer’s lawyers will draft the legal issues. Do you want a qualified or unqualified legal opinion? Unqualified. Does that mean you get some junior lawyer who has never done this kind of work? No, there are no qualifications or reservations or concerns about the legality of the debt and the tax status of the interest. That’s the qualifications, not the lawyers’ qualifications, it is who qualifies your opinion.

The Bond Buyer

What is The Bond Buyer? The Bond Buyer is a newspaper, a publication about ‘muni’ bonds. They have a well-known index. There are a bunch of indexes, which are revenue bonds. But then there is the GO bond index as well. So, a Bond Buyer is where you can learn about common bonds, we learned about in the 30-day pipeline, that is where we learn about how many bonds are being sold versus how many bonds are being issued.

Written by Dave Meshkov

Dave's mission (and job: Managing Director of Course Design) is to make FINRA exam training engaging, approachable, and dare he even say, enjoyable. Having trained and coached over ten thousand students to exam success he knows how to present complex subjects in memorable and understandable ways. Prior to joining Knopman Marks in 2011, Dave practiced bankruptcy law at Weil, Gotshal & Manages and served as a law clerk in a the Southern District of New York Bankruptcy Court working on the General Motors and Lehman Brothers bankruptcies. Building on his legal expertise and training allows him to keep all our courses updated with the latest legislative and rule-making changes. Dave currently trains for the Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam and the Top-Off Series 6, 7, 24, 57, 63, 65, 66, 79, 86, 87, and 99 exams. He also delivers executive one-on-one training and shares his passion for learning outside of work as a ski instructor and yoga teacher. Dave graduated magna cum laude from Fordham Law School, and cum laude with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

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