S&P Capital IQ has added Standard & Poor’s credit ratings to its Xpressfeed enterprise data feed, and upgraded the feed delivery from daily and monthly to near real-time, bringing static data into the near real-time world.
Xpressfeed including the credit ratings has been on beta test for a couple of months and went live this week. The feed already has thousands of users and many are expected to use the fixed income data added through the credit ratings alongside the feed’s existing fundamental data.
According to Rui Carvalho, managing director of S&P Capital IQ, “The Xpressfeed audience is predominantly investment managers and quantitative investors with an equity focus. They examine the fundamental data of companies to find alpha. But we have found customers using Xpressfeed for fundamental analysis increasingly want to merge a fixed income view into their equity models to get a more complete picture of total return, which is why we have added S&P Ratings’ credit ratings to the data feed.”
The fundamental and ratings content in the feed has been correlated, with the feed including a history of fundamental data since the 1960s and a history of credit ratings since 1922. “Marrying fundamental data and credit ratings, and their extensive historical data, is exciting in the investment management and quantitative investment space where models are based on deep historical analysis,” comments Carvalho.
He points out that linking the two asset classes of data makes sense for users as historical point in time dates have been linked across the data streams. This was not easy, but the result is extremely useful with users being able to select a common identifier for a company and pivot from, say, the company to a particular date, or a related fundamental or credit rating data point both at issuer and bond level.
With the addition of credit ratings has come an additional option in the delivery frequency of Xpressfeed, making it available in near real-time on a five-minute span basis. “This gets data that is traditionally viewed and analysed as static data to users much quicker,” says Carvalho. Xpressfeed was previously delivered on a daily or monthly basis.
Considering the divide between providers of fundamental data, such as Reuters, Bloomberg and Interactive Data, and credit rating agencies, such a Fitch and Moody’s, S&P Capital IQ suggests Xpressfeed allows quantitative investors to analyse correlated fundamental and ratings content in a way that has never previously been possible.
Within Xpressfeed there are several Standard & Poor’s credit ratings packages, including global issuers, structured finance and public finance. Within the feed as a whole there are over 100 subscriber services for clients to choose from. But the development of Xpressfeed does not end here, with more fixed income data from S&P Capital IQ due to be added along with other data sets required by clients to make financial decisions.
“This is the first enhancement we will make,” says Carvalho. “Our aim is to marry data that is traditionally consumed and analysed separately and provide users with new, logical packages of linked data. We will also capitalise on the near real-time data capability of Xpressfeed and distribute additional data sets at this frequency.”
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