S&P Forms New Valuation & Risk Strategies Group
Standard & Poor’s Fixed Income Risk Management Services (FIRMS), an analytics and research unit separate from S&P’s ratings business, has launched a new valuation and risk strategies (VRS) group. Bringing together independent research and analytics assets from across the business, the new VRS group was formed to provide investors with a robust, cross-market approach to assessing risk and value in portfolios.
The core competencies of the new VRS group include:
“There are many ways to measure risk, but if the recent financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that asset price is the great equalizer in the fixed income markets,” said Lou Eccleston, executive managing director, S&P fixed income risk management services. “By combining our market-leading fixed income price evaluation and market research assets into a single unit, we are giving investors an innovative new perspective that will expand the vernacular used to describe credit and fixed income risk. Now, investors will have an independent and transparent assessment of how well they are being compensated by the market for the risk they are exposed to in their portfolios.”