Interactive Data Corporation, a leading provider of independent pricing and evaluation services, today announced an expansion of the capabilities of its Fair Value Information Services (FVIS) by introducing a new 16:00 Central European Time (CET) evaluation point for Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern equity securities.
This new service is designed to help meet the fair value pricing requirements of European domiciled funds that utilize the popular 16:00 CET valuation point. Interactive Data utilizes a “bottom-up” evaluation process featuring a multi-factor regression methodology, resulting in security-level fair value evaluated prices.
This new FVIS evaluation time at 16:00 CET complements the service’s existing evaluation points throughout the global trading day, including London Noon (12:00 GMT), London Close (16:30 GMT) and New York Close (16:00 ET).
”The heightened market volatility continues to drive demand from European fund management clients investing in global equities for services that will assist them with their fair value pricing procedures,” said Liz Duggan, managing director, Global Evaluations for Interactive Data. “We believe our security-level approach provides stronger results for fund management clients versus a top-down, portfolio-level adjustment, which has been confirmed through back-testing.”
Interactive Data continually reviews the performance of its Fair Value Information Services in the context of current market events to identify potential methodology enhancements. The Japanese crisis earlier this year, the U.S. sovereign rating downgrade, and economic concerns in Europe have underscored the evolving relationships between global markets and the need for ongoing innovation. Recent enhancements include the addition of new regional and country index futures contracts as factors in certain models. Extensive back-testing measures validate the performance of these new product innovations, especially during stressed market conditions.
Interactive Data’s Fair Value Information Services are designed to provide market participants with various information that can be used to estimate a price for an exchange-traded equity security, equity index futures contract, or equity option that would likely prevail in a liquid market, in view of market information available at the time of evaluation.
Currently, more than 190 fund groups subscribe to Interactive Data’s Fair Value Information Service for equities. Earlier this year, the Company launched a Real-Time Fair Value Information Service, which provides real-time evaluated prices for more than 15,000 international equities throughout the trading day. Also in 2011, Interactive Data was awarded its second patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for Fair-Value Pricing of a Financial Asset. The first patent was awarded in 2007.
