ABS Pricing Concerns and Considerations

Abstract

Today, third-party vendors collect, maintain, and deliver data on millions of current and historical securities to support financial institutions’ and investment funds’ pricing activities, securities operations, research, and portfolio management. The vendors’ value added is to continually survey the entire bond market, to process, normalize and standardize pricing information, and to consider their evaluated prices in the context of all the market intelligence that is available. There is access to more market data today than before the financial crisis due to factors such as incremental increases in levels of transparency in FINRA’s Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine® (TRACE®), the growth of third-party market data vendors, an increase in the use of non-transactional market data where direct trades are not observed, a shifting focus from post-trade market data to pre-trade market data, and rising interest in real-time fixed income market monitors. Pricing differences among vendors are to be expected as a result of differences in methodologies, models and assumptions. With access to more market data available today, vendors are offering more derived analytics and efficiency tools around this data. There is rising interest in building context around the price. Vendors have their own particular way of observing market color, interpreting market inputs and drawing comparisons among securities. <b>TOPICS:</b>Asset-backed securities (ABS), legal and regulatory issues for structured finance