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Welcome to the Merritt Research Services LLC web site, designed to present you with municipal bond credit information at your finger-tips. We have been in business since 1986, originally launched as The Merritt System, providing municipal bond investors, raters and guarantors credit data and reports on their personal computers. In 2001, we became an independent, primarily employee-owned research company. Formerly we were associated with a major national mutual fund and investment management organization. We were the first company to allow users to check out standardized financial reports as well as sort, screen and aggregate hospital bond data to produce rankings, comparisons and trends. Building a municipal credit database has been a challenging task because municipal bond credit reporting is not regulated in the same way as for corporations. We do that job for you. We make it a priority to obtain annual reports on a timely basis for issuers that we track. Equally important, once we have the documents, we painstakingly extract financial statement and key operating statistics and input them into a consistent, industry-preferred format. Quality controls to maintain accuracy are rigorously deployed and supervised by our research team. We currently cover eight key municipal credit related sectors, encompassing approximately 3000 individual credit issuers related to tens of thousands of individual municipal bond issues, including: hospitals, municipal electric, joint action agencies, airports, tollroads, public higher education, private colleges, and state general obligation bonds. As we grow, we will be adding new sectors related to state and local credit quality. Our primary municipal credit database product is incorporated in Investortools Inc.'s CreditScope analytical software package. Coupled with Investortools' Perform software, the industry's most popularly used municipal bond analytics program, users are provided with a comprehensive tool to analyze municipal credit, bond and portfolio management positions. The combined systems' provide state of the art abilities to assess and compare financial statements, perform ratio analysis, statistical modeling and rank credits relative to peer groups and customized searches. In addition, the system can track credit holdings by wide variety of user defined criteria. Optimizing CreditScope's capability to act as a surveillance tool, our system links obligated credits with municipal bond issues by CUSIPS so that municipal bond portfolio holdings can be tracked by selected credit and bond information, including current bond ratings provided the nationally recognized rating agencies. On our web site, you can purchase individual municipal credit reports of financial statements and key ratios using our Merritt Express feature for any sector that we cover. Periodically, as a service to our visitors, we will highlight interesting statistical municipal credit trends based on annual report information on the graphs located on our home page. Each month, we will also feature key credit sector statistical reports intended to show trends, rankings and median benchmarks. If you would like more information about our research service or our subscriber based analytic software tool, CreditScope, please contact us. We hope you visit our site often. Sincerely, Richard A.Ciccarone
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