Travelling around Asian financial centres, I frequently meet people that read the Clarus Blog and I often get asked “You have great blog articles and free research but what do you sell?”.
In my article today, I will answer this question.
First, Some Info
Our weekly newsletter gets published, rain or shine, every Wednesday at 3pm London time. Each week it contains two or three new and original articles; so no regurgitation of news or press releases. Our newsletter subscriber list grows by about 10% per quarter and our website is currently averaging 50,000 page views per month, with user traffic generated both from our regular newsletters readers but also Google Searches for topics in capital markets.
We also publish a Daily Briefing that gives an overview of price and volume in USD and AUD Swaps. This is published at 8AM (UK) and is free to subscribe to. If you don’t already subscribe, you can do so here.
Why is the Research Free?
We do get asked why we don’t charge for our research.
Our research is based on the data and analytics tools that we develop and sell. This research, in the form of a free blog, helps us build and contribute to a community; a community with a shared interest in the topics we write about. Our conversation with this community, allows us to better understand our market and contribute to the debate on topics that interest us and other market participants.
In some sense we have open-sources our product strategy with the market, which in turn keeps our thinking and our products, current, open and relevant.
Analytics and Data.
We have two commercial product types, ones that we categorise into Analytics or Data.
Each of these is described below.
Risk Analytics
Charm is our real-time high-performance risk and margin platform designed to solve the challenges of the new derivatives market structure, in the context of regulatory reform since the Great Financial Crisis.
Charm is an AWS Cloud based platform, that is delivered as a Web GUI, as Microservices, or in Excel.
It offers pre-trade and post-trade portfolio level risk analytics for:
- IM and VM Margin calcs (Cleared and Uncleared)
- Back Testing for ISDA SIMM
- Margin Optimisation
- XVA analytics
- FRTB Capital
- SACCR
The high performance calculations of Charm is a key differentiator. In our demo’s we are always happy to show how we can do tens of millions of derivative mark to markets (MTM’s) for real customer portfolios 40x to 400x times faster than enterprise technology and all at a fraction of the infrastructure cost.
Charm is very easy to start using as we do not implement onsite but provide a service with easy to understand user interface and apis. In some use-cases, we can be in production from day one or week one. This also means that we frequently conduct trials with real customer portfolios.
Charm customers include clearing members, sell side banks, hedge funds and buy-side firms.
We have happy customers that love to talk about how Charm has solved pressing issues for them.
Data
Over the last 5 years Clarus has collected data that has been generated as a result of regulatory reform of derivatives markets. We normalise, filter and enhance this data and make it widely available for the market to use. The data is delivered via a GUI, an API or via SFTP.
Our data offerings are categorised into the following products that can be licensed separately or together.
CCPView
CCPView has daily volume (turnover and open interest) from OTC CCP’s and a few major ETD CCPs. It is aggregated data, typically at a product and currency, normalised and gives a global picture of the market.
CCPView also has CPMI-IOSCO quantitative disclosures published by CCPs, covering both ETD, OTC and Securities CCPs. This data includes the initial margin held, default fund size, credit risk and liquidity risk metrics and metrics on members and clients.
CCPView is used by CCPs themselves and by regulators, clearing members, sell side banks and buy side firms.
SEFView
SEFView has all SEF volumes (and for Japan ETP) since SEF’s started in 2013. Data is updated daily and allows SEF’s and market makers to assess and understand their daily share of the SEF volumes. It also shows where a product/instrument/currency/currency pairs liquidity is currently and is it changing. Data is aggregated but has some price related information (daily highs/lows etc).
SEFView is used by SEFs themselves and by regulators, clearing members, sell side banks and buy side firms.
SDRView
SDRView Researcher contains a complete view of trade data (FX, IR, CR, COM, EQ) reported to US SDR’s since 2013. This includes additional enriched data such as packaging of trades and the calculation of product appropriate analytics (e.g. DV01 for IRS).
SDRView Professional is a real-time view of trades as reported to the SDR’s. It provides real-time insight into what is trading in US OTC Derivatives markets and at what price and what size at any point in the trading day.
Clients that use SDRView include sell side banks, inter-dealer brokers, buy-side firms and regulators.
MIFIDView
We are in the process of launching this product, so please watch this space for our newest data offering.
The End
That’s it for a quick description of what we sell.
I hope this means I will no longer get the question “You have great blogs, but what do you sell?”.
Or if I do, I will have this article on hand to send to them.
If you are interested in more details on any of the above, we would be happy to help
Please feel free contact us at [email protected]