Scotia Capital today announced the launch of a new index for the Canadian fixed income marketplace. the Scotia Capital Maple Bond Index was developed following the elimination of Canadian foreign content restrictions and the resulting increase in issuance of foreign names in Canadian dollars.

The new index is the first to track performance of this growing sector of the Canadian bond market.

The index reflects the performance of foreign domicile issuers of Canadian currency denominated government and corporate bonds in the Canadian market. It tracks investment grade bonds with a minimum of 10 institutional buyers with a $100 million minimum amount outstanding for each issue. As of March 31, 2006, the index contained 55 government and corporate issues, with a total market value of approximately $20 billion, and a modified duration of 6.749 years.

To better address the utilization of this index in analytics, performance and benchmarking services, Scotia Capital has built and released a history from Dec. 30, 2005.

This new index is similar to all other Scotia Capital fixed income indices in that it utilizes a rules-based published methodology, which has been kept consistent for compiling historical data.

Methodologies for all of the indices can be found on Scotia Capital’s public Web site.