The Salomon Broad Investment Grade Index (known as the Salomon BIG or Citigroup BIG) is a common American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 Bond

Bond (finance)

In finance, a bond is a debt security, in which the authorized issuer owes the holders a debt and, depending on the terms of the bond, is obliged to pay interest to use and/or to repay the principal at a later date, termed maturity...

 index

Index (economics)

In economics and finance, an index is a statistical measure of changes in a representative group of individual data points. These data may be derived from any number of sources, including company performance, prices, productivity, and employment. Economic indices track economic health from...

, akin to the S&P 500

S&P 500

The S&P 500 is a free-float capitalization-weighted index published since 1957 of the prices of 500 large-cap common stocks actively traded in the United States. The stocks included in the S&P 500 are those of large publicly held companies that trade on either of the two largest American stock...

 for stocks, originally owned by Salomon Brothers

Salomon Brothers

Salomon Brothers was a bulge bracket, Wall Street investment bank. Founded in 1910 by three brothers along with a clerk named Ben Levy, it remained a partnership until the early 1980s, when it was acquired by the commodity trading firm Phibro Corporation and then became Salomon Inc. Eventually...

 and now run by its successor, Citigroup

Citigroup

Citigroup Inc. or Citi is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Citigroup was formed from one of the world's largest mergers in history by combining the banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate...

. The BIG is generally used for managing broad debt portfolios from short to long-dated maturities, similar to the Lehman Aggregate ("Agg") or the Merrill Lynch Domestic Master

Merrill Lynch Domestic Master

The Merrill Lynch Domestic Master is a common American Bond index, analogous to the S&P 500 for stocks, owned by Merrill Lynch. The Domestic Master is similar to the Salomon BIG or the Lehman U.S. Aggregate . The Domestic Master Index was created on December 31, 1975...

.

The BIG includes treasuries, agency debt

Agency debt

Agency debt is a security, usually a bond, issued by a U.S. government-sponsored agency. The offerings of these agencies are backed by the government, but not guaranteed by the government since the agencies are private entities. Such agencies have been set up in order to allow certain groups of...

, corporates, non-corporate credit

Non-Corporate Credit

Non-Corporate Credit is a catch-all term used to include types of bonds that are forms of credit, but not issued by private corporations - and therefore cannot be considered corporate debt...

, mortgage-backed securities

Mortgage-backed security

A mortgage-backed security is an asset-backed security that represents a claim on the cash flows from mortgage loans through a process known as securitization.-Securitization:...

, and asset-backed securities

Asset-backed security

An asset-backed security is a security whose value and income payments are derived from and collateralized by a specified pool of underlying assets. The pool of assets is typically a group of small and illiquid assets that are unable to be sold individually...

 (ABS). Unlike the Agg, it includes 144As, but unlike the Agg, it does not include municipals or commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS). Like the Agg, the BIG does not include any inflation linked bonds, and is limited to investment grade securities, including no high-yield debt

High-yield debt

In finance, a high-yield bond is a bond that is rated below investment grade...

 or emerging market debt

Emerging Market Debt

Emerging market debt is a term used to encompass bonds issued by less developed countries. It does not include borrowing from government, supranational organizations such as the IMF or private sources, though loans that are securitized and issued to the markets would be included...

.