Morgan Stanley's fixed-income trading desks showed strong results in Institutional Investor's fourth annual fixed-income trading rankings, which were included in the magazine's November 1998 issue.

Morgan Stanley ranked fifth overall, maintaining its 1997 position on II's Top 20 Trading Firms list. The Firm's secondary CMBS trading desk received a number-one ranking for 1998, a move up from its 1997 second-place rank — after Lehman Brothers, ranked second this year. Morgan Stanley's Asset-Backed Securities Trading came in third place, making the top five for the first time this year.

Other fixed-income trading desks also received top five ranking this year, including:

Desk		1998 Rank
Corporate Securities		2
Intermediate and Long-Term Securities		5
Repurchase and Reverse Repurchase Agreements		2
Collateralized Mortgage Obligations		5
Yankee Bonds		2
Fixed-Income Swaps		5

Poll results from the beginning of August 1998 through mid-September 1998).

Institutional Investor offered the following description of its survey methodology: "Institutional Investor conducted phone interviews with traders and portfolio managers drawn from the 300 largest money management firms in the U.S. Respondents were asked to pick the top three firms relative to their trading of fixed-income securities in each of 18 different cash or derivatives products.

For all the categories, interim results were generated by awarding three points for a first-place vote, two points for second and one point for third. Those raw numbers were weighed using an Institutional Investor formula that assigns a greater value to larger money management institutions. Although only the top firms in each individual category are listed, in computing the overall ranking, all firms were credited for each vote they received."