@pipeworx/finra-fixed-income

FINRA fixed income MCP — US bond market activity in aggregate: Treasury trading volumes, corporate and agency debt market breadth and sentiment, securitized product pricing and trading activity, and capped-volume series. Platform key (free FINRA Public credential); BYO supported.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• finra_fixed_income_datasets() — list the 21 dataset keys, what each series measures, and the date field it filters on. Keyless.
• finra_fixed_income_series({ dataset, start_date?, end_date?, limit? }) — fetch a series. With no date range it returns FINRA's latest published period; with start_date/end_date it returns that window.

Scope

Aggregate market statistics only. This pack does not return individual bond transactions. The TRACE transaction tape is a separate FINRA product, excluded by §8 of the terms below and priced under FINRA Rule 7730 with a mandated six-to-eighteen-month reporting delay. It is not available here and asking for it will not produce it.

Pricing — zero-rated, by licence

Every call costs 0 credits on every tier, and does not count toward volume-pricing brackets. This is not a promotion and not a pricing decision. FINRA's Specific Terms for Fixed Income Data §2.3(b) permit redistribution only where "there is no additional or incremental fee charged for the Fixed Income Data", so a billed version of this pack would breach the licence. The pack sets meter: { credits: 0 } and the gateway pack entry sets zeroRated: true — both are required, because under pricing-v2 even a 0-credit call is an anchored request that advances a customer's monthly bracket and so changes what their next call costs.

Two other conditions of the same clause are met in the response and in our published terms: attribution (every response carries an attribution field naming FINRA as owner and source) and no further redistribution by callers (https://pipeworx.io/terms §6). Callers may use this data for non-commercial personal or professional use and may not redistribute it.

Auth

Platform key on the gateway (PLATFORM_FINRA_KEY), or BYO.

OAuth2 client_credentials. The key is "<clientId>:<clientSecret>" — Client ID and Client Secret joined by a colon, the same convention epo-ops and euipo use. A free Individual / Public credential from https://developer.finra.org carries the whole Fixed Income group at $0/month per https://developer.finra.org/fees.

Activation caveat

A FINRA credential is inert until activated: registration produces a FINRA Gateway UserID, the API Terms of Service must be accepted in the API Console, and the secret is set through an emailed link that expires in 24 hours (the Client ID arrives in a separate email). An unactivated credential fails at the token exchange with a 401, which reads like a wrong password rather than an unfinished signup.

The signup itself is a human web flow — developer.finra.org/create-account sits behind a JavaScript bot challenge and has no HTTP path.

Known gap

treasuryWeeklyAggregates is not exposed. The name resolves and the dataset publishes field metadata, but on our credential it returns zero rows at every window tried — including 2021-01 to 2021-03, the range FINRA's own docs use as the worked example for it. Rather than advertise a key that can never answer, it is left out with a note in the source. Daily and monthly Treasury aggregates both work.

Gotchas

• The token host is ews.fip.finra.org, not ews.finra.org. The latter is the credential self-service host and answers the token path with a bare HTTP 500 and an empty body, with nothing to suggest the host is simply wrong.
• Dataset names are not derivable from the catalog page. The anchor slugs on https://developer.finra.org/catalog (corporate_debt_market_sentiment) do not convert to API names by any rule: the real name is corporateMarketSentiment — "Debt" is dropped. Likewise "Securitized Products Trading Activity" is securitizedProductTradingActivity (singular "Product") and "Corporate And Agency Capped Volume" is corporatesAndAgenciesCappedVolume (both plural). The real names are listed in the request examples on https://developer.finra.org/docs. A wrong name returns a 404 that names the dataset back at you, so it reads as a missing dataset rather than a typo.
• There is no group listing. GET /data/group/FixedIncomeMarket and GET /metadata/group/FixedIncomeMarket are both 404. But GET /metadata/group/FixedIncomeMarket/name/<dataset> is keyless and works as a name oracle: 404 means no such dataset, 200 means it exists and publishes field metadata, 400 means it exists but publishes none.
• Each dataset has its own date field — tradeDate, tradeReportDate, reportDate, beginningOfWeekDate and beginningOfTheMonthDate are all in use, and there is no common one. Filtering on the wrong field is a hard 400 ("The following fields are not available in this dataset"). Each entry in the pack's DATASETS map carries its own; finra_fixed_income_datasets reports it as date_field.
• FINRA's default row order is ascending, and sortFields is not a way around it. The platform restricts sortFields to requests that also carry a compareFilters entry of type EQUAL on every partition field — and for these datasets the partition field is the date, so "newest first" cannot be expressed as a sort at all. Left alone, the tool answers "how is the corporate bond market trading" with rows from 2023 and looks entirely successful doing it. The pack instead reads GET /partitions/group/FixedIncomeMarket/name/<ds> (credentialed), takes the newest partition value, and pins the query to it with an EQUAL filter. The pricing datasets (TBA, ARM/hybrid, specified pool, CMO, CMBS, CBO/CDO/CLO, securitized activity) publish neither metadata nor partitions, so there is nothing to pin to — those fall back to a trailing 180-day window, which is enough to reach their current rows. The order field states which of the three paths the call actually took, including the case where none worked and the rows really are the oldest on file.
• A dataset with nothing to return answers 200 with a completely empty body, not []. Parsing that as JSON throws "Unexpected end of JSON input", which reads as a bug in us rather than as "no rows" — treasuryWeeklyAggregates does exactly this on an unfiltered request.
• These series publish on a reporting lag, so a very recent date range can be genuinely empty rather than wrong.

Data sources

• Token: https://ews.fip.finra.org/fip/rest/ews/oauth2/access_token
• Data: https://api.finra.org/data/group/FixedIncomeMarket/name/<dataset>
• Metadata (keyless): https://api.finra.org/metadata/group/FixedIncomeMarket/name/<dataset>
• Partitions (credentialed): https://api.finra.org/partitions/group/FixedIncomeMarket/name/<dataset>
• Catalog: https://developer.finra.org/catalog
• Licence: https://developer.finra.org/specific-terms-fixed-income-data

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "finra-fixed-income": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/finra-fixed-income/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/finra-fixed-income/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/finra_fixed_income_datasets \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/finra_fixed_income_datasets. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "finra-fixed-income": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-finra-fixed-income"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-finra-fixed-income

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Finra Fixed Income data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT