Have you looked at this site?

www.fixedincomeinvestor.co.uk/x/bondtable.html?gro...4

Lists corporate and government bonds with yields, maturities and sometimes helpful narrative.

You can register free with Moodys to look up company ratings. Not sure about other agencies. Of course the ratings agencies got it wrong big time before the banking crisis.

I wouldn't dare give advice on specific investments (and I have often wondered why the people who do it for a living don't give up their jobs and get rich taking their own advice) but I unreservedly recommend "Smarter Investing" by Tim Hale. £10 on Amazon at the moment. Any non-professional investor will get many times their money's worth from it.

Edited by Manatee on 27/03/2010 at 10:22

>> I know the site but it does not include ratings as far as I can see

No, I've never found a 'list' of ratings against all bond issuers, not a free one anyway.

What I meant to say was that you can narrow it down a lot by searching for yields and maturities that suit you, and then look up the individual issuers.

e.g. you can list out the corporate bonds on the Fixed Investor site and see that BT 2020 8.625% are priced at about £1.17, YTM 6.17%, then look up the Moodys rating on BT - which as it happens is Baa2 with a negative outlook.

Of course what I would really want to know is whether OFCOM will allow BT to price in the costs of repairing its £9bn pension deficit, and I'm not sure that Moodys knows that either!

I hadn't seen that, thanks.

I'm not a stock (or bond) picker, though I have a bit of my modest ISA and SIPP savings in a corporate bond managed fund for balance (one with relatively low charges and through a fund supermarket so no front end commission). I suppose I could cut out the middle man, but I don't feel especially confident about buying and selling bonds - any I bought directly would likely have to be investment grade+ and with a view to holding until redemption.