For my first blog of 2019, I wanted to reflect on the topics that were popular on the Clarus blog in 2018.
Top New Blogs in 2018
Starting with a ranking of the most popular new blogs that we published in 2018.
- Settle to Market – What you need to know about STM
- MiFID II Why ISINs for OTC Derivatives are bad for transparency
- Libor OIS March 2018 Update
- Benchmark reform – An EONIA replacement is coming very soon
- Libor OIS What is going on?
- Cross Currency Swaps and Libor-OIS
- 2017 CCP Market Share Statistics
- MiFID II Live Blog – The Data
- Default at Nasdaq Clearing
- Cross Currency Basis and Turn of the Year
- SOFR – What you need to know
- FRTB – Revisions to market risk capital requirements
The top six with > 3,000 views each, the next six with > 2,000 views each, a total of 35,000 views for these 12.
STM in number one spot; a little noticed but very important topic in clearing.
MiFID II in number two and eight, a classic case of a theme which started the year with a bang and ended in a whimper; most disappointing from a transparency point of view. (Fingers crossed for 2019 on this).
Libor-OIS, Benchmark reform (EONIA, SOFR, SONIA) and Cross Currency Swaps, all big topics in the year.
If you have not read one of these or need a refresher, please click on the title.
Top Blogs in 2018
Next the blogs that we published in earlier years, ranked by their views in the year 2018. These we term “evergreen” as they get views most days, largely from Google search and have become established as prime reference articles for the topic in question.
- Mechanics of Cross Currency Swaps
- SA-CCR: Standardised Approach to Counterparty Credit Risk
- Mechanics and Definitions of Spread and Butterfly Swaps
- Capital Ratios and Risk Weighted Assets for Tier 1 US Banks
- FRTB – The Default Risk Charge
- The IMM Roll for Swaps – What is It and What are the Volumes?
- Fundamental Review of the Trading Book – What You Need to Know
- Principal Component Analysis of the Swap Curve
- FRTB – Internal Models or Standardised Approach
- Risk Participation Agreements – What Are They?
- OIS Swap Nuances
- CME LCH Basis for Dummies
- Exploring Seasonality in a time-series with R’s ggplot2
- Mechanics of Asset Swaps and Government Bond Swap Spreads
- BRL Interest Rate Swaps
- Capital Requirements for Exposures to CCPs
- Basel III Leverage Ratio
- FRTB – Excel Calculator for the Standardised Approach
- ISDA SIMM 2.0 – What You Need to Know
- FRTB Modellable Risk Factors and Non-Modellable
- SA-CCR Explaining the Calculations
- ISDA SIMM Excel Calculator
- Fed Fund Swap Nuances
- CME LCH Basis Spreads
- FRTB Curvature Charge
The top eight with > 5,000 views each, the next five with > 4,000 views each, the rest with > 3,000 views each, a cumulative 130,000 views for these 25 blogs.
If you interested in one of these and have not already read or need a refresher, please click on the title.
The top two in the list stand out; Mechanics of Cross Currency Swaps with 19,000 views and SA-CCR with 14,000 views, each with > 5 mins of average time on the page. The cumulative time spent on these two is a staggering 3,100 hours or 129 days!
Incredible, who would have thought that such niche topics would prove so popular.
Categories and Topics
Our most active categories were:
In each of these we added at least 10 new blog articles in the year.
These categories reflect not only our own interest but more importantly what our readers find to be of value based on the view statistics data that we collect.
Website traffic
Traffic on the Clarus website continues to rise.
A monthly average of:
- 3,400 users in 2014
- 6,200 users in 2015
- 9,700 users in 2016
- 15,500 users in 2017
- 19,200 users in 2018
Most months we now get 20,000 users visiting our website, primarily to read our blogs, and we averaged 48,000 page views a month in 2018.
More 2018 statistics:
- We published 105 new blog articles in the year.
- There are now 730 articles on our website.
- 103 articles had > 1,000 views in the year.
- 212 days with > 900 unique users on our website.
- The highest single day with 1,505 users,
- The highest week with 5,850 users.
- For the year our website had 575,539 page views,
- From 337,782 sessions and 193,290 users.
- The cumulative time spent by all users was > 10,000 hours or 426 days.
A phenomenal amount of time.
We strive each week to create original content that educates, informs and interests readers.
We hope to continue to do the same in 2019.
It is gratifying that the data shows that so many of you follow the Clarus blog.
We hope you will continue to do so.
If you don’t already, please sign up here.
You don’t want to miss out on what your peers are reading.
Or please recommend to your colleagues to sign up too.
Your support and comments are much appreciated.
It remains for me to thank you.
I wish you all the best for 2019.
Corrected the figures in the last 3 bullet points in the More 2018 Statistics section as these had been incorrectly entered for the period since Jan 2015 (as in the chart), instead of my intention of using the 2018 calendar year