Can someone point me to a source to build our 15 year historical table for WSJ Prime using January 1 as the change date.
Thanks.

Try website www.nfsn.com/library/prime.htm.

Thank you very much for the information. I have now bookmarked that site for future reference.

There's nothing about this site that indicates that the "prime rates" listed will match to-the-day the values published in the WSJ. These kinds of sites show averages. The only way I ever found to research indexes published in the WSJ in a manner that I thought would stand up to tough scrutiny (exam or lawsuit) was to go to the public library and print from infotrack copies of the Money Rates pages that announced the official WSJ prime as of the dates I needed.

This site provides the exact date the WSJ prime changed and what value it changed to since 1975.

http://www.hsh.com/indices/prime.html

We built a Prime Rate Lookup workbook for Excel that you can download FREE from the CAMELS' Eye(r) Consulting website. It has the prime rates back to 1933 and you can enter any date and it will recover the Prime Rate that was in effect on that date. Go to:

www.camelseye.com > Free Downloads > Prime Rate Lookup

The workbook also includes a hyperlink to the Fed site to keep it current. I hope you enjoy it (if you download it).

Rob Robinson
CAMELS' Eye(r) Consulting
www.camelseye.com

Once again, be careful to use the "prime rate" that is specified in your loan agreements--not whatever is readily available on the Internet. When prime is moving quickly, it's not unusual for primes to differ among major banks for a day or two. Although Rob's workbook may be very handy, unless your agreements say you use "the prime rate as announced on the CAMELS' Eye(r) Consulting website", you are taking a chance that your disclosures are based on the wrong index. If (more likely) your agreements say your interest rate is based on "the highest prime rate published in the Money Rates section of the Wall Street Journal", then that's the only place that will have the official value for your index. Other published "prime rates", including the average primes shown in H-15 may equal your official source, but why take the chance?

As we pick nits, I used to criticize official documents that said to quote the WSJ prime. WSJ doesn't have a prime, but as Richard noted, refer to "the highest prime rate published in the Money Rates section of the Wall Street Journal".

We aren't picking nits, Andy. Index errors can (and have) result(ed) in HUGE reimbursement cases. There are many ways things can go wrong, but I've seen the ones listed below. If other posters are free to share, we can compile quite a list of misadventures with index errors.

Errors:
1. Used the wrong index to disclose and service ARM loans. (someone nick-named the index the "T-bill rate", so a clerk obtained and used T-bill auction averages rather than the correct index which was one of the H-15 "constant maturity" statistics.)
2. Changed customers' interest rates too often or too infrequently. (Mistaken belief that because the index value had changed, the customers' rates should, too. The note? What does that have to do with anything?)
3. Picked the index value for some date other than the one specified in the credit agreement.
4. Rounded the index plus margin in a manner inconsistent with the notes. (Don't we always do it this way?)
5. Forgot to check the index value and change the customers' rates. (No one told me that was part of the job.)

Mr. Insley:

Your several responses indeed contain good and valuable information with the exception that there is no such thing as "the prime rate as announced on the CAMELS' Eye(r) Consulting website" as you stated in your referenced posting. There is simply a free download titled Prime Rate Lookup that uses prime rate data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's ftp site:

ftp://ftp.ny.frb.org/prime/prime.txt

This was mentioned in our original posting and is glaringly apparent in our Free Download.

Perhaps, if you choose to reference CAMELS' Eye(r) in further postings, you will take the time to more accruately communicate in the future.

Kindest Regards,
Rob Robinson
CAMELS' Eye(r) Consulting
www.camelseye.com

Sorry, Rob. I wasn't expressing an opinion about your website, but rather the practice of grabbing the easy data rather than the right data. My advice about using second hand data still applies--unless data comes from the primary source, there is a risk that it is inaccurate for a variety of reasons.