Thanks for visiting The Mortgage Reports. To stay absolutely current on mortgage markets and important guideline changes, be sure to take my free daily email alerts.

For fun, I tried to map Barry Bonds historical monthly home run output against the historical monthly return of mortgage-backed bonds.  I found it nearly impossible. 

There's loads of data available on Barry Bonds.  What's more, most of it was free.  There were countless sites breaking down Barry month-by-month, pitcher-by-pitcher, and every which way.

By contrast, I came up empty when looking for data on mortgage bonds.  All the links to data were hidden behind Members Only web sites.

It's interesting that sports sites provide statistics for free, but charge to read commentary while market sites do the reverse -- they give the commentary away but make you pay for data.

In any case, I struggle to find good charts to help illustrate the posts I write and the ones that I do find are usually highly technical and laced with "strange" images.  The lay person doesn't know how to these such charts, so I don't bother posting them here. 

What good is the information if you can't understand it? 

And that's why we talk in plain English around here. 

If I'm talking about mortgages in terms of mambo dogface in the banana patch, it's going to go over your head.  If I talking about them in sports terms, though, it won't.

If every financial Web site made data as accessible as commentary, Americans would probably know as much about finances as they do about baseball.

Dan Green is an active loan officer. Email or call 513-443-2020. Dan is on Twitter at @mortgagereports.