Corvids evaluated pricing service covers over 14,000 illiquid assets issued from more than 70 countries in 22 different currencies. With over 200 different industry groups, we price assets ranging from Government guaranteed transactions to bespoke structured products. As a market based pricing service, we also collect more than 200,000 market data points each day.
Our teams work closely with all of our clients, from buy-side funds to sell-side investment banks and other market participants who require a robust and consistent data source.
We continually update our pricing models to ensure that all of our processes are consistent with any necessary accounting guidelines such as those outlined in FAS 157 and IAS 39. Our market based valuations help our clients in managing risk, calculating NAV’s and for reporting under regulation such as AIFMD, MiFID II and CRD IV/CRR. Every valuation we produce is a “best efforts” opinion of the market bid price, of an orderly transaction, under normal market conditions.
All of our pricing is formatted according to client’s requirements and can be delivered by email, web services, SFTP or Bloomberg. For firms with in-house platforms that require bespoke delivery setups, our technology team has experience in creating both push and pull solutions.
All of our pricing is open for challenge and we ensure that clients deal directly with the relevant pricing team. All challenges are treated as a priority with a target turnaround time of no more than 24 hours.
Pricing illiquid assets
In order to ensure consistency and relevance, our pricing processes adopt the accepted market based pricing methodologies relevant to each asset class.
Our analysis begins with execution data on more liquid securities in each asset class. We also track new issuance for additional execution pricing. This is combined with a broad collection of broker runs and other market intelligence gathered from the firms contact base.
This data is filtered for durability and is then allocated into buckets based on several factors such as jurisdiction, rating, structure, currency and industry. This allows us to create a credit map of each sector and jurisdiction that we cover. This credit map is the starting point for our evaluated pricing service.
In addition to placing our illiquid assets onto our credit map, we also assign a spread weighting to each asset based on our in-house liquidity calculations. Our liquidity assessments take into account elements such as deal size, the relative size of the potential investor pool, the size of the sector and the historical performance of both the issuer and the sector. This process generates a liquidity margin that we combine with our evaluated yield to give a target return from which we calculate a price.
For more complex, structured products, we build our own pricing models in conjunction with our clients in order to analyse an asset in the same way any institutional investor would. For more details about our complex security valuation service please see here.
Our price challenge service puts clients in direct contact with our valuations team who are happy to discuss all elements of our process. Clients are free to challenge pricing, methodology and data inputs.
All of our valuations are based on our opinion of where the bid side of the market is for each security. Our pricing assumes normal market conditions, a round lot trade size and a fixed sale period of between 5 and 20 days depending on the needs of the client.
For more details about our evaluated pricing process click here.
