sqx

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q1 2026 Review

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:15:19 GMT

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q1 2026 Review

As winter turned to spring, the SQX team was hard at work. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to:

Structured Note Reference Data

As of Q1 2026, SQX now offers structured note reference data ! We’ve often heard our clients struggle to find a comprehensive, accurate universe of structured note reference data. That’s why we’ve stepped in to fill this gap. Parsed directly from SEC 424B2 prospectus filings, our structured note reference data universe is the most complete and accurate dataset in the industry that we’ve encountered.

Our coverage spans the major dealers (including BMO, Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas and more) across autocallables, reverse convertibles, participation, principal-protected, leveraged/inverse, digital, and range accrual structures. Our partners receive the data feed as three clean, ISIN-joined files that cover 60+ fields per note.

By accessing our structured note reference data, firms can discover new possibilities for evaluated prices and analytics. This offering comes as a natural extension of our long-standing structured note pricing coverage, arriving as we prepare to launch municipal bond reference data later this year.

SQX Alts Growth

SQX Alts , our alternative investments news site, has begun to realize its potential in the past quarter. In recent months, we’ve expanded our events coverage, upgraded our alts directory, and refreshed our site design. Also, our news and SEC filing coverage now provides insight into investment opportunities in over 1200 non-traded REITS, DPPs, BDCs, commodity pools, interval funds, closed-end funds, tender-offer funds, and operating companies.

In March, our representatives Adam Hammond and Sarah Engel connected with numerous sponsors at the 2026 Factright RIA Due Diligence Conference. The overwhelmingly positive response demonstrated that SQX Alts is able to meet the industry's need for an unbiased and transparent hub for alts news and information. We’ve begun partnering with individual sponsors, and we’re on track to begin publishing featured content in the upcoming weeks.

Keep an eye on SQX Alts as we continue to grow and improve!

Publicly-Issued Alts

Over the past several months, our alternative investments team has created a system to gather pricing and reference data for the full universe of publicly issued, non-publicly-traded alts. Our coverage includes over 1100 non-traded REITS, DPPs, BDCs, commodity pools, interval funds, closed-end funds, tender-offer funds, and operating companies. SQX provides an overview of the security type, (such as interval funds, DPPs, and REITS), as well as a brief summary of the issuer’s business model. We can also provide the most recent SEC-reported price for each share class.

With SQX’s clean, current list, teams can save hours spent gathering this data by hand. Our authoritative, daily-refreshed universe will be available in the coming weeks.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Pricing Uncertainty: Inside FX Option and Swaption Volatility Surfaces

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:11:17 GMT

Pricing Uncertainty: Inside FX Option and Swaption Volatility Surfaces

Where the Market Is vs. What the Market Expects

Yield curves, spot rates, and bond prices tell you where the market is right now. But there's another category of data that tells you something arguably more interesting: what the market expects, and what it fears. That's the realm of implied volatility, the language that options markets use to price uncertainty.

Two of the deepest, most actively-quoted option markets in the world are foreign exchange options and interest rate swaptions. The volatility data they generate underpins much of modern derivatives pricing, hedging, and risk management. Both produce rich volatility surfaces—and for swaptions, full cubes—that quants, traders, and risk teams rely on every day. Let's dig into how each market is structured, what makes the data unique, and what separates a volatility dataset you can build on from one that quietly introduces noise into your models.

A Quick Refresher on Implied Volatility

Implied volatility is the volatility number that, when plugged into an option pricing model, returns the option's observed market price. It's the market's collective view on how much the underlying is likely to move, expressed as a single, model-friendly number.

In practice, implied vol isn't a single number at all — it's a surface, or for products like swaptions, a cube. That surface spans strikes, expiries, and (in the swaption world) underlying swap tenors. Real-world surfaces are almost never flat. Different strikes carry different vols, producing the familiar volatility skew or "smile." Skew encodes a lot of information about how the market is pricing tail risk, directional bias, and supply-and-demand pressures across strikes—which is why options skew is something portfolio managers and risk teams pay close attention to, not just market makers.

Foreign Exchange Options and Their Volatility Surfaces

Foreign exchange options give the holder the right, but not the obligation, to exchange one currency for another at a future date and an agreed strike. They're used heavily for currency hedging, for structured products with FX payoffs, and for taking directional or volatility views on currency pairs.

What makes the FX options market a little different from equity options is its quoting convention. Rather than quoting individual strikes, the market quotes vols by delta. The standard set is at-the-money (ATM) volatility, plus risk reversals and butterflies at the 25-delta point—and for many pairs, the 10-delta as well. A risk reversal captures skew: the difference between out-of-the-money call vols and equivalent-delta put vols, which tells you which direction the market is leaning. A butterfly volatility quote captures the curvature, the wings of the smile. Together, those three quote types let you reconstruct the whole surface for a given expiry.

Reliable FX options data matters because it touches everything downstream: FX option pricing, valuation of cross-currency derivatives and structured products, hedging FX exposure, and managing risk across multi-currency portfolios. If your FX implied volatility inputs are stale or smoothed too aggressively, every position downstream inherits that error.

How SQX Handles FX Option Volatility Data

SQX publishes daily FX volatility surfaces, including skew, across 30 global currencies plus gold and silver, all quoted relative to USD. The data is built from market-observable quotes pulled directly from dealer desks rather than from modeled or interpolated inputs, then run through a structured cleaning pipeline that removes outliers and stale prints before publication.

You get bid and ask coverage, intraday or end-of-day delivery to fit your workflow, and up to five years of historical data for backtesting and model validation. The dataset includes Spot Date, Bid, Ask, Unique Identifier, Currency, Delta, Quote Type, and Option Tenor—enough granularity to rebuild the full surface or feed it straight into a pricing engine.

Swaption Volatilities and the Volatility Cube

A swaption is an option on an interest rate swap. It gives the holder the right to enter into a swap at a future date on predetermined terms. For example, this could be the right to pay fixed at 4% on a 10-year swap starting one year from now. Swaptions sit at the heart of fixed-income optionality, and their vols feed almost every model that touches embedded interest rate risk.

What makes swaption pricing genuinely harder than equity or FX option pricing is the dimensionality. Swaption vols don't live on a 2D surface, they live on a cube. There are three axes: option expiry (when you can exercise), swap tenor (how long the underlying swap runs), and strike (the rate you're locking in). That extra dimension means more cells to populate, more places where the data can be thin or stale, and considerably more cleaning required before the cube is usable.

The convention here is also different from FX. Where FX option vols are quoted in lognormal terms, swaption vols are typically quoted as normalized, or basis-point, volatility. The reason is practical: lognormal vol breaks down when rates approach zero or go negative. Normalized vol handles those regimes gracefully, which is why it became the standard during the long stretch of zero and negative-rate environments globally.

Swaption volatility data drives a wide range of valuation and risk work: callable bonds, mortgage prepayment models, structured rates products, and any portfolio carrying embedded optionality on interest rate options or swaps. It's also a critical input for asset/liability management at insurers and pension funds, where small shifts in interest rate volatility can move liability valuations meaningfully.

How SQX Builds Its Swaption Vol Cubes Using the SABR Model

SQX publishes daily normalized swaption volatility cubes across 20 of the most active global currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, and a wide range of additional G10 and emerging-market currencies, with skew included. The cubes start with real dealer quotes and are then calibrated daily using the SABR model, a widely-adopted framework that handles a broad range of market conditions, including negative rates. The result: a clean, consistent volatility cube that's ready for downstream use.

Coverage spans short-dated options on long-dated swaps and vice versa, supporting workflows from short-tenor risk monitoring to long-dated structured product valuation. As with our FX option data, swaption data ships intraday or end-of-day, with up to five years of history. Fields provided: Spot Date, Normalized Volatility, Unique Identifier, Currency, Option Tenor, Swap Tenor, and Strike.

What Makes a Volatility Dataset Trustworthy

Whether you're sourcing FX vol surfaces or swaption cubes, a few things separate a dataset you can build on from one that introduces hidden noise. First, the inputs should come from real dealer quotes wherever possible. Modeled vols can fill gaps, but they shouldn't be the foundation. Second, the cleaning process matters: outlier detection, stale-quote handling, and consistency checks across the full surface or cube need to happen before the data ships, not after a downstream user notices something odd. Third, coverage has to match your book. A vol dataset that's deep in G10 but thin in emerging markets isn't much help if your portfolio runs the other way. And finally, delivery should fit your workflow—intraday refresh or end-of-day snapshot, in a format and on a schedule that doesn't force you to rebuild your pipeline around it.

The SQX Approach

Across both FX option and swaption volatility data, our approach is consistent: real market inputs, transparent methodology, broad coverage, competitive pricing, and customer service that actually responds. The two products are designed to sit alongside the rest of our derivatives data offering, so valuation and risk teams can pull a coherent set of inputs from a single source.

To learn more about SQX's volatility data coverage, contact us !

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Understanding Yield Curves: Swap, FX Forward, and Credit Default Swap Curves

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:32:32 GMT

Understanding Yield Curves: Swap, FX Forward, and Credit Default Swap Curves

In our previous post , we broke down the foundational types of yield curves (global, corporate, and municipal). These curves are rooted in cash bond markets and give investors a direct read on borrowing costs across issuers, sectors, and maturities.

But cash bonds only tell part of the story. Sitting alongside them is a parallel universe of yield curve data derived from derivative and forward instruments, curves that capture interest rate expectations, credit risk, and currency dynamics in ways that bond-based curves simply can't. For derivatives desks, risk teams, and portfolio managers navigating global markets, these are indispensable.

This post picks up where Part 1 left off. We'll walk through four curve types that round out the picture: quoted swap curves, swap-implied curves, FX forward curves, and credit default swap curves, covering what each one tells you, why it matters, and how SQX sources and delivers them.

Quoted Swap Curves

A quoted swap rate curve is built directly from interest rate swap quotes contributed by dealer banks—the bid and ask levels they're willing to transact at across tenors from short-dated maturities out to 30 years or more.

What makes these curves valuable is their directness. Instead of being modeled or interpolated from other instruments, they reflect actual executable levels in the interbank swap market. That's a meaningful distinction. If you're pricing a new swap, marking an existing book, or stress-testing your own yield curve construction against real-world levels, quoted interest rate swap data is the benchmark you measure against.

SQX's Quoted Swap Curves

SQX builds its quoted swap curves from quotes sourced directly from top-tier global dealer banks—not aggregated from third-party platforms. Every curve passes through a multi-layered validation process that includes completeness checks, consistency checks, kink removal, gap filling, and curve shape verification. The result is clean, trade-ready swap rate data with bid and ask yields across a wide range of global currencies, available end-of-day or intraday.

Swap-Implied Curves

If quoted swap curves show you where the market trades, swap-implied curves show you what's embedded underneath. These are zero-coupon yield curves and discount factors extracted—or "bootstrapped"—from the most liquid traded instruments, often anchored to the overnight index swap curve (OIS).

Bootstrapping, in plain terms, is the process of reverse-engineering individual zero-coupon rates from the prices of instruments that mature at different points in time. The result is a smooth, continuous discount curve—a single, coherent framework for valuing any future cash flow. In most major currencies, the OIS curve has become the standard foundation for this process, replacing the older LIBOR-based approach that dominated pre-2008.

Why does this matter day-to-day? Because nearly every derivatives valuation—from a vanilla interest rate swap to a complex structured note—depends on a reliable discount curve. The zero-coupon yield curve and its associated discount factors are the quiet infrastructure that makes modern pricing work.

How SQX Builds the Discount Curve

SQX derives its swap-implied curves from the most liquid observable instruments using OIS-based construction where applicable, following industry-standard bootstrapping methodology to produce smooth, arbitrage-free results. Coverage spans 33+ currencies, from the majors (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CHF) to a broad set of emerging-market currencies. Data is available intraday or end-of-day, with up to 5 years of historical data for backtesting and trend analysis.

FX Forward Curves

An FX forward curve maps the price of exchanging one currency for another at future dates, built from spot exchange rates and the FX forward points layered on top of them across tenors. It's tempting to read these as the market's forecast of where a currency pair is headed. But more precisely, the FX forward rate at each tenor reflects the interest rate differential between the two currencies, an arbitrage relationship rather than a directional bet.

That distinction aside, FX forward data is mission-critical for anyone managing cross-border exposure. Whether you're hedging receivables in a foreign currency, valuing a cross-currency swap, or running a multi-currency portfolio, the currency forward curve is a core input. And because forward points shift with rate expectations and liquidity conditions, stale or poorly validated data can quietly introduce real pricing risk.

How SQX Delivers FX Forward Data

SQX sources its FX forward curves from real-time, dealer-contributed quotes (not delayed composites) and applies rigorous validation including outlier detection and freshness checks to ensure every data point reflects current market conditions. Coverage spans FX spot and forward curves across a wide range of global currency pairs, with intraday or end-of-day delivery and up to 10 years of historical data.

Credit Default Swap Curves

A CDS spread curve plots the term structure of credit default swap spreads for a given reference entity—like a major bank, a sovereign issuer, or a high-yield corporate. At each tenor, the credit default swap spread represents the annual cost of buying protection against that entity's default. A steeper curve implies the market sees more risk further out; an inverted curve can signal near-term distress.

What makes credit default swap pricing particularly powerful is speed. CDS spreads tend to react to new information faster than bond spreads shift or rating agencies act. When credit conditions are evolving quickly—a leveraged buyout announcement, a sovereign debt renegotiation, rising sector-wide stress—the CDS spread curve is often the first place the market's reassessment shows up.

SQX's CDS Curves
SQX’s CDS curves cover 2,000+ reference entities and popular CDS indices across a wide range of currency, restructuring clause, and tier of debt combinations. Curves are built from real dealer quotes, not indicative marks, and cleaned for outliers and stale data. A proprietary composite methodology averages validated spreads into consensus CDS spread data. Unusual features like curve inversions undergo manual review to ensure accuracy rather than getting smoothed away by an algorithm. Daily delivery is standard, with up to 10 years of historical data available.

The Full Picture

Between the cash-bond curves in Part 1 (global, corporate, and municipal) and the four derivatives-based curves covered here, SQX's yield curve suite spans the full landscape: sovereign and credit markets, interest rate swaps, FX forwards, and credit derivatives. Seven distinct types of yield curves, each purpose-built for a different corner of fixed income and derivatives.

The common thread across all of them is how they're built. Every curve in the suite reflects the same principles: transparent yield curve construction, rigorous validation, dealer-sourced inputs, competitive pricing, and a team that picks up the phone. Whether you need a single swap rate curve for USD or credit default swap data across thousands of global entities, SQX delivers clean, validated, ready-to-integrate yield curve data. To learn more about SQX's yield curve coverage, contact us !

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Understanding Yield Curves: Global, Corporate, and Municipal Curves

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:07:13 GMT

Understanding Yield Curves: Global, Corporate, and Municipal Curves

If you work in fixed income, yield curves are part of your daily life. They're the foundation for pricing bonds, modeling risk, discounting cash flows, and benchmarking portfolio performance. The term structure of interest rates is one of the most important tools in the fixed-income toolkit—and the quality of your curve data has a direct impact on the quality of your analysis.

But not all yield curves serve the same purpose. Global sovereign curves, corporate credit curves, and municipal curves each reflect different markets, different risks, and different use cases. Let's walk through the three core types of yield curve data, what makes each one valuable, and what to look for in a provider.

Global Yield Curves: The Risk-Free Foundation

Global yield curves, also called sovereign or government bond yield curves, represent the term structure of interest rates for a country's government debt. These are typically constructed as zero-coupon curves derived from actively-traded government bonds, giving you a clean read on the time value of money at each maturity point.

Why do they matter so much? Because sovereign curves serve as the risk-free benchmark for virtually every other fixed-income instrument in that country's market. When you discount future cash flows on a corporate bond, you start with the government curve. When you assess whether a credit spread is wide or tight, you're measuring it against the sovereign rate. And when you're doing cross-border analysis (comparing opportunities in, say, German bunds versus U.S. Treasuries versus Brazilian government bonds), you need reliable, consistently constructed global curves to make meaningful comparisons.

SQX Global Curve Coverage

SQX provides daily global yield curve data covering 70 countries, with maturities spanning the full curve from 1 month out to 30 years. For many countries, coverage includes short-term money market maturities at the 1-month, 3-month, and 6-month points, letting you see the front end of the curve where central bank policy expectations are most directly reflected. Curves are updated daily and sourced from country-specific primary sources, so you're working with data that shows each local market's conventions and instruments.

Corporate Yield Curves: Pricing Credit Risk Across Ratings

Corporate yield curves build on the sovereign foundation by adding a layer of credit risk. Where a government curve reflects the risk-free rate, a corporate credit spread curve captures the additional yield that investors demand to compensate for the possibility of default. These curves are segmented by credit rating, so you can see how the market prices risk differently for an AAA-rated issuer versus a BB or CCC-rated one.

This data is essential for anyone involved in corporate bond pricing, relative value analysis, or credit portfolio management. If you're comparing two bonds with similar maturities but different ratings, the corporate curve tells you whether the spread differential is in line with the broader market or whether there's an opportunity. It's also a critical input for bond valuation models, regulatory capital calculations, and stress testing exercises that require rating-specific discount factors.

SQX Corporate Curve Coverage

SQX delivers daily corporate yield curves across seven credit rating tiers: AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B, and CCC. That full spectrum of investment-grade and high-yield coverage gives you a comprehensive view of how credit spreads behave across the ratings landscape. One thing that sets SQX apart here is transparency: SQX shares the underlying constituents of each curve, so you can see exactly which issuers and bonds are driving the data. No black boxes.

Municipal Yield Curves: Navigating a Unique Market

Municipal yield curves occupy their own corner of the fixed-income world. Muni bonds are issued by state and local governments, agencies, and authorities, and they come with characteristics you won't find in other bond markets. The most notable is tax-exempt status—interest on most munis is exempt from federal income tax, and often from state and local taxes as well. That tax advantage means muni yields can't be compared to taxable bond yields on an apples-to-apples basis without adjustment, making dedicated muni curve data a necessity rather than a nice-to-have.

The muni market is also highly segmented. General obligation bonds backed by the taxing power of the issuer behave differently from revenue bonds backed by specific project cash flows. Health sector bonds carry different risk profiles than transportation or education bonds. And callable munis need to be evaluated differently from non-callable ones. All of this means that a single "muni yield curve" often isn't enough—practitioners need a family of curves that reflect the market's actual structure.

SQX Municipal Curve Coverage

This is where SQX's municipal yield curve offering comes in. SQX provides a transparent, data-driven methodology built on observable market data—a meaningful alternative to the black-box approaches that have long been common in the muni space. Curves are updated on an intraday basis, with hourly refreshes that capture how the market moves throughout the trading day.

Coverage includes benchmark curves, credit-specific curves spanning AAA through BBB, and breakdowns by general obligation and revenue bonds. Specialized sector curves, including health sector curves, are also available, along with insured spread curves and callable versus non-callable variants. Data files deliver not just the curve yields themselves but also constituent bond pricing and underlying market data, so you can trace every data point back to its source. And if you need something more tailored (a state-specific curve, a custom sector breakdown, etc.) SQX builds custom curves on request.

Why Reliable Yield Curve Data Matters

Whether you're marking a portfolio to market, running a VaR model, preparing for a regulatory exam, or evaluating relative value across sectors, the yield curve data you use is only as good as the methodology and timeliness behind it. Stale data leads to mispriced risk. Opaque methodologies make it harder to defend your valuations. And gaps in coverage force you to rely on interpolation or approximation when precision matters most.

That's why it's worth being deliberate about where your curve data comes from. SQX is built to serve fixed-income teams that need transparent methodology, broad coverage, and responsive service—at competitive pricing. With daily updates across global and corporate curves, intraday updates on municipal curves, and full visibility into underlying data and constituents, SQX gives you the tools to trust your numbers.

Global, corporate, and municipal curves are the bedrock, but they're not the only yield curves worth mentioning. SQX also covers q uoted swap curves, swap-implied curves, FX forward curves, and CDS curves. We'll be taking a closer look at these datasets in an upcoming post, so stay tuned.

To learn more about SQX's yield curve coverage, contact us !

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

The 5 Whys

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:56:33 GMT

How We Find the Real Problem (Not Just the Obvious One)

We all mess up. Projects fail. Campaigns flop. Things that were supposed to work just...don't.

That's fine. Seriously. What's not fine is when we mess up the same way twice because we never figured out what actually went wrong.

That's where the 5 Whys comes in. It's one of the most underrated tools in our toolkit, and we need to get better at using it.

Here's the concept

Most failures aren't random. They're the end of a chain of cause-and-effect relationships that started somewhere upstream, probably in a place we weren't looking. The 5 Whys is dead simple: we take a problem, ask "why did this happen," then ask "why" again. And again. Five times total.

Toyota invented this. Not a consulting firm. Not an MBA program. A car manufacturer that needed to figure out why machines kept breaking. They asked why five times and kept finding the answer hiding three or four layers deeper than anyone expected.

We're going to do the same thing.

When to use it

This works best for problems that are within our control and moderate in complexity . Think: the campaign that underperformed, the launch that got delayed, the feature that nobody used.

Use it when:

Something went wrong and we own the outcome
The problem is specific enough that our team can reason about it
We need to stop treating symptoms and start treating causes

Don't use it when:

The fix is already obvious (just fix it and move on)
The problem is massive and systemic, touching dozens of teams — the 5 Whys can be a starting point here, but we'll need a much broader investigation
The root cause sits entirely outside our team's knowledge or control —no amount of brainstorming will uncover something we fundamentally can't see

How we run it

This isn't complicated. If you've ever run a retro or a brainstorm, you can run a 5 Whys. All we need is a whiteboard (or a shared doc if we're remote) and about 45 minutes.

Step 1: State the problem

Write down one clear problem statement. Not three. Not a vague feeling. One statement.

Example: "Our fundraising campaign missed its goal by 30%."

Step 2: Set up the space

Divide a whiteboard (or doc) into five columns. The first column gets the problem statement, phrased as: **"Why did [problem] happen?"**

Step 3: Set the tone

This matters more than you think. Before we start, say this out loud: *We're here to find the cause, not to find someone to blame.* Everyone needs to understand this is collaborative. There are no wrong answers. We're investigating, not prosecuting.

Step 4: Brainstorm the first "why"

Give the team five minutes. Everyone throws out contributing factors. Don't filter. Don't debate. Just collect.

Example answers for why the campaign missed its goal:

Click-through rate was too low
Digital leads didn't convert
The campaign wasn't engaging enough for our audience

Step 5: Pick one thread and pull

Vote on which answer is most worth investigating. Then rephrase it as the new "why" question.

Example: "Why wasn't the campaign engaging for our audience?"

Step 6: Repeat three more times

Same process. Ask why. Brainstorm. Vote. Rephrase. We do this until we've asked "why" a total of five times. By the fifth round, we should be staring at something that looks a lot like a root cause.

Example of how the chain might go:

Why did the campaign miss its goal? → The campaign wasn't engaging.
Why wasn't it engaging? → The copy didn't connect emotionally.
Why didn't the copy connect? → We wrote it based on assumptions, not research.
Why were we relying on assumptions? → We skipped the audience research phase.
Why did we skip audience research? → We committed to a launch date before scoping the work.

That fifth answer is the real problem. We over-committed on timeline before understanding what the work actually required. That's fixable. That's systemic. That's the kind of insight that changes how we operate going forward.

Step 7: Decide what we're going to do about it

Don't leave the room without assigning action. Pick one or two solutions that address the root cause. Assign each to a specific person with a specific check-in date.

Example: "From now on, we scope audience research into every campaign timeline before committing to a launch date. Sarah owns updating our campaign planning template. Check-in: two weeks."

Tips that actually matter

Run it backwards to stress-test. Start from your root cause and use "therefore" to walk back up the chain. If the logic breaks anywhere, you haven't gone deep enough.
Never land on "someone made an error." Human error is almost never the root cause — it's a symptom. If someone made a mistake, ask why the mistake was possible. Unclear process, unrealistic workload, no review step. Keep pulling.
Go past five if you need to. Five is a guideline, not a law. If your fifth answer still feels like a symptom, keep asking. Stop when you've hit something structural you can actually change.
Use breakout groups for large teams. More than eight people in the room? Split into smaller groups after the first round, let each follow a different thread, then reconvene and compare root causes. One problem often has several contributing roots.productive and makes sure nobody walks out feeling blamed.

The real point

The real value of the 5 Whys isn't any single root cause you find. It's building a team that asks "what happened in the system" instead of "whose fault was this." That shift — from blame to curiosity — is what separates teams that repeat mistakes from teams that compound their learning. Every problem we dissect properly makes us harder to break next time.

If you work anywhere in financial services pricing data, you know how much complexity hides beneath the surface — across fixed income, derivatives, structured products, treasuries, whatever your coverage universe looks like. Every feed, every source mapping, every transformation step is a place where upstream assumptions can quietly go wrong. The 5 Whys gives you a way to stop chasing the same categories of errors and start eliminating them.

Of course, the even better version of this is starting with reference and pricing data that's already been through that level of scrutiny — where someone else has already traced the cause-and-effect chains so you don't have to. That's what we build at SQX . But whether you're using our data or maintaining your own, the principle is the same: stop fixing symptoms. Find the root cause. Fix it once.

Wall Street's Quiet Revolution

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:39:23 GMT

How structured products went from niche curiosity to 8,000 new filings a month — and why almost nobody is paying attention.

We're going to tell you about something happening in financial markets right now that almost nobody outside a very specific corner of Wall Street is talking about.

We've been watching the data on SEC Form 424B2 filings — the regulatory filings submitted every time a new structured product is issued — and the numbers are staggering.

In 2001, about 120 of these filings happened per month. Today, it's over 8,000. That's a 70x increase.

And almost nobody outside the industry is talking about it.

The numbers don't lie

From 2001 to 2005, the market was tiny. Around 120–130 filings a month. Then 2006 hit, filings more than doubled, and by early 2008 they peaked at 718 in a single month. Then the financial crisis happened.

Here's where it gets interesting. By 2012, the market had already surpassed its pre-crisis peak. The worst financial crisis in a generation barely dented the trajectory.

From 2013 to 2019, the market tripled. From 1,000 filings a month to over 3,000. Steady, relentless growth. The kind nobody writes headlines about because it doesn't crash or spike. It just compounds.

And then 2020 happened. We went from roughly 3,500 filings a month to regularly exceeding 7,000–8,000 by 2024 and 2025. The trend line is unmistakable. This market is accelerating.

Why this is happening

Rates stayed low for a very long time, and when you can't earn a decent yield on traditional bonds, structured notes suddenly become very attractive. The products themselves got better — multi-asset structures, ESG-linked products, cryptocurrency-linked notes. Every time a new asset class gains traction, someone wraps a structured product around it.

And digital distribution blew the doors open. The same democratization that happened with stock trading is now happening here. The barriers that kept people out — complexity, minimums, lack of information — are falling fast.

The gap is the opportunity

When monthly filings go from 120 to 8,000 in 24 years, that's not a cycle. That's a fundamental change in the architecture of capital markets. And the infrastructure hasn't caught up.

If you're a distributor trying to track 8,000+ new filings every month, you are drowning. The volume has grown so fast that most systems were built for a world with a fraction of this activity.

This market grew 70x in 24 years and it's still accelerating. The gap between the scale of the market and the quality of the infrastructure supporting it is enormous. That gap is where we live — and we think it's the biggest opportunity in structured products today.

We built our structured note reference data platform for exactly this problem: clean, complete, term-sheet-level data parsed directly from every 424B2 filing, delivered machine-ready so your team can stop reverse-engineering prospectuses and start making decisions.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Announcing SQX Structured Note Reference Data

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:13:51 GMT

Announcing SQX Structured Note Reference Data

Comprehensive Term-Sheet-Level Data for the U.S. Structured Note Market

The structured note market is booming. With over 100,000 active CUSIPs in the U.S. alone, structured notes have become a go-to instrument for investors seeking tailored risk-return profiles. But while the market has grown, the data infrastructure around it hasn't always kept pace.

Pricing data tells you what a note is worth. But what does the note actually do? What are its barrier levels? When can it autocall? What happens to the coupon if the underlier drops 30%? What's the payoff at maturity if the worst-performing stock in the basket falls below its initial level? These are the questions that reference data answers. And now, SQX is stepping in to provide it.

We're excited to announce SQX Structured Note Reference Data — a comprehensive feed that delivers term-sheet-level detail for structured notes, sourced directly from SEC 424B2 prospectus filings.

What Is Structured Note Reference Data?

If you work with structured notes, you know that each note is defined by a prospectus — a legal document filed with the SEC that spells out every detail of how the note works. The prospectus covers the underlier(s), the payoff mechanics, the coupon structure, the autocall conditions, the issuer's call rights, and much more.

Unlike a plain-vanilla bond, where a CUSIP, coupon, and maturity date tell you most of what you need to know, a structured note's behavior depends on dozens of interlocking terms. Two notes with the same underlier and the same maturity can have completely different risk profiles depending on their barrier levels, autocall schedules, and payoff structures.

Reference data captures all of this. It's the structured, machine-readable version of everything in the prospectus — the "what," "when," and "how" behind every structured note.

Why Does This Matter?

Until now, getting this data has been a challenge. Prospectus filings vary in format from issuer to issuer. Extracting the relevant terms and normalizing them into a consistent structure requires significant effort. Many firms either do this work manually or simply go without.

We think the industry deserves better. That's why we decided to step in.

What's in the Feed?

Our Structured Note Reference Data feed is delivered as three pipe-delimited files, all joined by ISIN:

Reference Data : One row per note, with 61 fields covering everything you'd find on a term sheet. This includes identification (ISIN, CUSIP, issuer, currency, issue and maturity dates), classification (legal wrapper, payoff profile, tax treatment), product mechanics (settlement method, FX handling, dividend treatment, basket calculation method), autocall details (structure type, trigger levels, observation frequency, step-down schedules), coupon terms (rate type, frequency, barrier levels, memory features), issuer call provisions, and economics (offering price, estimated value, gross spread, selling concession, total offering amount, and more).

Underliers : One row per note and underlying asset. For single-underlier notes, there's one row. For multi-asset structures — like worst-of baskets — there's one row per constituent, capturing the underlier name, basket weight, initial fixing level, and fixing date.

Payoff Structure : A piecewise-linear map of each note's maturity payoff. Each row is a breakpoint: given a final underlier level (as a percentage of its initial fixing), the investor receives a corresponding payout (as a percentage of notional). Connect the breakpoints, and you've reconstructed the full payoff curve — buffers, caps, leverage, barriers, and all.

Who Is This For?

Structured note reference data supports a wide range of workflows across the front, middle, and back office:

Portfolio managers and analysts who need to understand what's in their book — not just the price, but the mechanics, risks, and embedded optionality of each position.
Risk and compliance teams responsible for monitoring barrier levels, autocall triggers, and coupon conditions — or for classifying notes by payoff profile and tax treatment.
Operations and data teams looking to automate the ingestion of structured note attributes, replacing manual keying from prospectus PDFs.
Quantitative teams who need payoff structure data to build scenario analyses, stress tests, or fair-value models.
Wealth management platforms seeking to provide advisors and clients with clear, structured information about the notes they hold.

What Kinds of Notes Does It Cover?

Our feed covers notes issued by major dealers across the full spectrum of payoff structures, including autocallables, reverse convertibles, participation notes, principal-protected notes, leveraged and inverse products, dual-directional notes, digital payoffs, range accruals, and more.

Whether the note is a simple buffered growth product or a complex multi-asset autocallable with contingent coupons and a step-down call schedule, the reference data captures its structure in a consistent, normalized format.

Built on Our Structured Note Expertise

SQX has been a trusted provider of structured note pricing for years. We aggregate end-of-day prices from our global network of sell-side desks, covering over 100,000 structured notes — one of the most comprehensive offerings in the U.S.

Structured Note Reference Data is a natural extension of this work. We already understand the structured note landscape — the issuers, the product types, the data complexities. Building a comprehensive reference data feed was the next logical step.

And like everything we do at SQX, this product is built on the principles that have guided us since 2001: cost-effective data, transparent methodology, responsive service, and flexible delivery. Whether you receive data via SFTP or API, you'll get the same reliable, well-organized files our clients have come to expect.

Get Started

If you're interested in SQX Structured Note Reference Data — whether to complement your existing pricing feed or as a standalone product — we'd love to tell you more.

Visit our Structured Note Reference Data page or contact us directly. We'll be happy to answer your questions, walk through the data, or set up a sample file.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

SQX 2025 Year-in-Review

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 23:50:31 GMT

SQX 2025 Year-in-Review

Note from the CEO

“Think big.”

If you listen to enough motivational speakers, you’ll hear these words. As advice goes, it’s pretty good. One of our core SQX values is continuous improvement, which pushes us to go big, work hard, and run the extra mile to serve our clients.

But in 2025, we did more than just “think big.” We aimed to “think new.”

“Thinking new” means that we’re not content to keep doing the same thing we’ve always done in the same way we’ve always done it. We’re always looking for new frontiers to expand into, and even better ways to deliver the data our clients count on us for.

In 2025, we announced a new vision statement, launched several new data products, prepared to expand our new alternative investments news site ( SQX Alts ), laid the groundwork for new muni and structured note reference data, and made our alts pricing system better than ever.

As we continue to “think new” in 2026, we know that we can’t do anything valuable—new or old—without your support. Thank you for trusting SQX and coming alongside us for another year. We’re grateful for you, and we look forward to showing you what’s ahead in 2026!

—Timothy Tatum, CEO of Securities Quote Xchange

New Vision Statement

In the past year, SQX introduced a new vision statement that reflects where we’re headed and how we think about our role as a company: “To be an innovative leader in streamlining the flow of information across the finance industry.” Our clients know SQX for responsive service, transparency, and reliable market data; our vision is the “why” behind the “what.” Our drive to be an innovative leader is the reason we build smarter, faster, and more intuitive ways to deliver financial information.

This vision recognizes that SQX is more than a data provider. From news sites like SQX Alts to new data products, we’re focused on improving how information is sourced, shared, and understood across the market. In practice, that means listening carefully, moving quickly, thinking creatively, and designing solutions around real client needs. As we look ahead, our goal is to not only participate in the market data ecosystem, but to help set the standard for how financial information travels.

Added Several New Data Products

In 2025, SQX grew in a rather obvious way: by adding several new data products!

New fixed income asset classes:

Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) – over 1 million securities
Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) – approximately 20,000 securities
Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) – approximately 23,00 securities
Non-Agency Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) – over 265,000 securities
Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs), including Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) – over 20,000 securities
Syndicated Bank Loans – approximately 3,000 securities
Green Bonds

New Yield Curves:

New Volatilities:

In the months since we’ve launched these new asset classes, we’ve been excited to see our new offerings attract such a high level of interest—particularly our structured finance products. As SQX continues to grow, we’re excited to include these new datasets as part of our core offering.

Laid the Groundwork for SQX Alts Expansion

This year, we set the stage for a major expansion of SQX Alts . Launched in 2024, SQX Alts is a resource that provides alternative investment news and information. SQX Alts delivers daily news on topics relevant to the alts world, posting 3-4 articles daily. In addition, SQX Alts features a detailed directory of alts sponsors, publicly-issued securities, and news articles relevant to specific sponsors.

While 2025 was a year of quiet growth and behind-the-scenes work, we’re poised to expand SQX Alts in a big way in 2026. We can’t say more right now, but keep an eye on our news updates and on sqxalts.com . SQX Alts has been on the runway, and we’re almost ready to take flight.

Prepared to offer Reference Data

In 2026, SQX is preparing to offer two new types of reference data.

Our muni reference data —built in partnership with Exchange Data International (EDI) and Municipal Bond Information Services (MBIS) —will cover over 1.5 million active muni bonds across 50,000+ issuers. We’ve hosted several fruitful market data feedback groups in 2025, where experts in the muni world have met with our team to ensure our dataset meets industry needs.

In addition to muni reference data, in late 2025 SQX built the foundation for structured note reference data! When ready, our structured note reference dataset will feature the most important attributes of a note’s structure, performance profile, and lifecycle. It will include fields describing payoff behavior, underlying asset dependencies, and coupon features—alongside other datapoints that provide a full analytical and operational view of each structured note.

Keep an eye out for our updates, since we’ll be launching both sets of reference data soon!

Improved Alternative Investments Process

Over the last year, SQX continued to build on the foundation of our world-class alternative investments pricing system. We’ve strengthened our validation checks (especially for publicly issued DPPs and REITs), while automating data entry, file creation, and database workflows. We’ve restructured our research operation, accelerating the onboarding of new securities. These upgrades have helped us reach greater accuracy, consistency, and speed than ever before.

SQX continues to cover the full universe of alternative investments, including privately issued securities. We provide pricing updates as soon as they’re available, passing along issuer-quoted data—including FINRA 2231(c) information. Our clients receive a single streamlined alts file that helps them reduce operational burden and focus on higher-value work.

We’re excited to see what the future holds as we continue to “think new” in 2026! Thank you for joining SQX on our journey. We hope to keep walking with you for years to come!

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Understanding Syndicated Bank Loans and Green Bonds

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:59:35 GMT

Understanding Syndicated Bank Loans and Green Bonds

Growing Asset Classes

As global credit markets continue to diversify, two asset classes have gained attention for very different reasons: syndicated bank loans and green bonds. The former offers floating-rate exposure and access to corporate credit risk, while the latter channels capital toward environmental initiatives. Both are coming to play important roles for investors seeking yield, diversification, or alignment with sustainability goals.

Since interest in these asset classes will only grow, it’s worth taking a look at why these instruments matter and how they function within the broader fixed income landscape.

What Are Syndicated Bank Loans?

Syndicated bank loans are large corporate loans provided by a group of lenders (typically banks, credit funds, or institutional investors) to a single borrower. This loan syndication process allows lenders to share risk while enabling companies, often private-equity backed or highly leveraged, to access substantial financing for acquisitions, refinancings, or expansion.

These loans are commonly structured as senior secured loans, frequently in the form of Term Loan B (TLB) tranches with floating interest rates tied to benchmarks like SOFR. Because they sit high in the capital structure and are backed by collateral, investors view them as offering attractive risk-adjusted returns relative to traditional bonds.

How Syndicated Loans Trade

Unlike public corporate bonds, the syndicated loan market trades in a relatively opaque and decentralized way. The bank loan secondary market relies heavily on dealer-quoted levels transmitted through email, chat, and runs distributed to the leveraged finance community. Trading volumes can be modest, and execution tends to occur through bilateral negotiation rather than exchanges.

This structure makes pricing transparency a persistent challenge. Corporate loan pricing often reflects a patchwork of dealer marks, trading interest, and credit views, which may vary significantly across institutions. Market participants—including CLO managers, hedge funds, and loan funds—must monitor credit risk indicators, liquidity conditions, and broader leveraged loan market dynamics to assess value. To help straighten out this complex world, firms often turn to trusted data vendors like SQX to provide the much-needed transparency.

What Are Green Bonds?

While syndicated loans focus on credit and structure, green bonds emphasize purpose and environmental impact. A green bond is a type of sustainable bond or ESG bond in which proceeds are dedicated to environmentally beneficial projects, such as renewable energy development, clean transportation, and water sustainability programs.

Over the past decade, the green bond market has expanded rapidly as both governments and corporations incorporate climate-related goals into their financing strategies. Investors increasingly seek exposure to climate bonds and other sustainable finance instruments that support environmental outcomes.

Issuers and Standards

Green bonds are issued from a wide variety of sources—including sovereigns, municipalities, supranational agencies, banks, and corporations. Their credibility often depends on adherence to the Green Bond Principles, which outline best practices for use of proceeds, transparency, and impact reporting for green bonds. Third-party verification is common, helping investors assess whether a bond meaningfully contributes to environmental impact investing.

Investment Considerations

Although green bonds trade similarly to conventional fixed income instruments, investors weigh factors such as:

Alignment with ESG or sustainable investing mandates
Yield and credit risk compared to standard bonds
Liquidity, which may vary depending on issuer type
Regulatory frameworks and evolving sustainable finance regulations

These considerations have made green bonds an important component of ESG fixed income investing.

The Role of Reliable Valuation

Investors across both syndicated bank loans and green bonds depend on accurate and consistent pricing for portfolio management, risk monitoring, and regulatory reporting. SQX helps support this need by collecting and distributing data, providing transparent prices to hedge funds, regulators, and money managers around the world. Though these spaces can be difficult to navigate, SQX has a mission to improve visibility throughout the fixed-income market, giving our clients a reliable look at what’s actually going on.

As the credit landscape continues to change, understanding instruments like syndicated bank loans and green bonds will be crucial for navigating risk, uncovering opportunity, and supporting sustainable economic growth. These markets may be different in purpose and structure, but both reflect the continued expansion and sophistication of today’s global fixed income ecosystem. To learn more about SQX’s coverage of syndicated bank loans and green bonds, contact us !

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

SQX and Investortools: Market-Driven Data for Millions of Municipal Securities

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:30:34 GMT

SQX and Investortools: Market-Driven Data for Millions of Municipal Securities

This article was originally published by Investortools.

Pricing municipal bonds can be notoriously hard to do at scale, creating challenges for portfolio managers, compliance officers, and firms managing diverse portfolios.

Enter SQX, a leading pricing and analytics provider for fixed-income markets. Since 2017, Investortools has partnered with SQX to offer clients access to end-of-day portfolio pricing for nearly one million municipal securities.

“Investortools is the perfect partner to showcase our evaluated muni bond prices,” said Tim Tatum, CEO of SQX. “Our goal is to ensure that financial professionals receive the high-quality, trusted data needed to navigate the complexities of today’s fixed-income landscape.”

Market-Driven Data

For greater transparency and accuracy, SQX bases its pricing on real market data from Municipal Bond Information Services (MBIS) . SQX’s proprietary pricing engine evaluates daily quotes, trades, yield curves, reference information, and peer bonds to produce both daily and intraday pricing updates.

Each price is supported by detailed input data, intermediate values, and other reference points, giving institutions the clarity they need to better manage risk and meet regulatory requirements.

By emphasizing a market-driven approach rather than solely relying on traditional bootstrapping, interpolation, or matrix pricing, SQX delivers more actionable and timely evaluations. This focus on current market conditions can help financial institutions reduce risk, improve accuracy, and strengthen their investment strategies.

“SQX has been a trusted partner in our ongoing mission to bring clarity and transparency to the municipal bond market,” says James Morris, Senior Vice President and Head of Sales at Investortools. “Their pricing solutions integrate seamlessly with our platform and uphold the high standards our clients expect, empowering confident and more informed decision making.”

About Investortools

For more than four decades, Investortools has been a leading SaaS provider of solutions regarded by the industry as a prerequisite for fixed-income investment management. Its comprehensive product suite covers portfolio, order, and execution management, performance analytics, 2a-7 compliance, and credit analysis. Trusted by over 200 firms managing more than $1 trillion in assets, Investortools supports SMA managers, fund managers, broker-dealers, and other key market participants.

About SQX

Securities Quote Xchange (SQX) is a financial data vendor that specializes in gathering and distributing difficult-to-price security quotes for the investment industry. SQX's coverage includes municipal bonds, fixed-income securities, structured notes, alternative investments, yield curves, and derivative data. SQX distinguishes itself with responsive customer service, informational transparency, affordable costs, and secure data delivery via SFTP or API. To learn more about SQX's data coverage, contact us .

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q3 2025 Review

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 19:32:35 GMT

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q3 2025 Review

Fall is here, and SQX has been busy. Let’s take a look at what has developed for SQX in the past three months:

Structured Note Reference Data

Recently, SQX has been moving into the reference data space, beginning with our offering of muni reference data , slated to launch in 2026. In Q3, we began laying the groundwork for structured note reference data!

When ready, our structured note reference dataset will capture all essential attributes of a note’s structure, performance profile, and lifecycle. It will include fields describing payoff behavior, underlying asset dependencies, and coupon features—alongside other datapoints that provide a full analytical and operational view of each structured note.

Keep an eye out for more updates! In the meantime, if you’re interested in structured note reference data, or our existing structured note pricing , let us know!

Increasing Interest in New Products

Q2 saw the launch of a vast array of new products, and we’ve been pleased to see that interest in them is very high. We’ve particularly delighted that our offering of structured finance—sometimes called structured products by large broker/dealers in the US—has been so well received.

In addition to structured finance ( MBS , ABS , CMBS , CMOs , and CLOs & CDOs ), the new asset classes we offer include Syndicated Bank Loans , “Green” Bonds , Quoted Swap Curves , Swap-Implied Curves , FX Forward Curves , Credit Default Swap Curves , FX Option Volatility Data , and Swaption Volatility Data . As these securities become a standard part of SQX’s data offerings, we look forward to seeing continued growth for these asset classes.

If you’re interested in receiving structured finance, yield curves, or any of our new data products, just contact SQX !

Alternative Investments Process Improvements

In the last quarter, we’ve upgraded our alternative investments process. We've streamlined our system, automating more of our data input processes, and we’ve restructured our research operations to dramatically increase the speed of onboarding new securities. As a result, the data our alternative investments clients receive is even more secure and streamlined than before.

We cover the full universe of alternative investments (including privately-issued securities), delivering issuer-quoted information in a single streamlined file. If you’re interested in learning more, contact SQX .

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Understanding Structured Products

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 18:19:29 GMT

Understanding Structured Products

A Complex Tool

Structured products form a vital part of the global fixed income market, offering investors exposure to diverse pools of loans, mortgages, and other credit assets. These securities can be complex, but when properly understood, they provide valuable tools for managing risk, accessing yield, and diversifying portfolios.

In this guide to structured products, we’ll walk through the key structured product categories and show how SQX helps clients navigate them with transparent, reliable pricing.

Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS)

Mortgage-Backed Securities pool thousands of home loans into tradable bonds, giving investors broad exposure to the U.S. housing market. Issued by government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae, Agency MBS are among the most liquid and creditworthy fixed-income instruments. Their performance is influenced by borrower behavior—especially prepayments—which shift with interest rates and economic conditions.

At SQX, we provide evaluated pricing on over 1 million Agency MBS , using market-based yields and cashflow models informed by housing, employment, and remittance data. Each valuation is benchmarked against comparable securities to ensure consistency.

Asset-Backed Securities (ABS)

ABS are securities backed by assets such as credit card receivables, auto loans, and student loans. Their performance depends on collateral type, structure, and borrower behavior. Essentially, the cashflows from the underlying loans are passed through to investors, with payments of interest and principal depending on how borrowers repay their debts.

We deliver daily valuations on approximately 20,000 ABS , applying benchmark yield curves, tranche-level adjustments, and new-issue pricing. Default and prepayment assumptions are carefully tuned, and outputs are checked against trade data and market color to ensure accuracy.

Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS)

CMBS are created by pooling loans secured by commercial real estate properties like office buildings, hotels, and shopping centers. Investors in CMBS receive payments that ultimately come from tenants paying rent and businesses repaying their mortgages. Senior tranches are paid first and offer more stability, while subordinate tranches take on more risk in exchange for higher potential returns.

SQX prices about 23,000 CMBS , using deal type, vintage, and shelf data alongside property-level metrics. This rigorous approach allows clients to evaluate credit-sensitive bonds with confidence.

Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO)

CMOs are structured from pools of residential mortgages. Unlike traditional MBS, they are divided into tranches with differing maturities, coupons, and risk levels. Investors can match cashflow profiles to their investment needs, but the trade-off is that CMOs carry risks tied to borrower behavior, such as prepayment and default.

SQX covers over 265,000 non-agency CMOs , modeling tranche-level cashflows with market-driven prepayment and default assumptions, then validating against shelf quality, servicer performance, and peer structures.

Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) & Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)

CLOs pool syndicated corporate loans, while CDOs may include a wider range of debt instruments. They’re structured in layers (senior, mezzanine, equity), with returns tied to both underlying loan performance and manager expertise.

We price over 20,000 CLOs and CDOs daily. Our models are built to account for manager ratings, tranche-level adjustments, NAV-based overcollateralization analysis, and default/recovery assumptions. Prices are validated against observable market trades, giving clients dependable benchmarks.

Why SQX?

Structured products—with all their complexity and diversity—demand detailed analytics, timely data, and careful validation. SQX’s evaluated pricing services combine observable market inputs with disciplined modeling and rigorous quality assurance. We offer our clients everything they need to be confident in the data we provide, including daily or intraday updates, full transparency, flexible service, and cost-effective pricing.

Whether it’s MBS, ABS, CMBS, CMOs, or CLOs/CDOs, SQX is the ideal partner for institutions seeking reliable data. Interested in learning more about our structured product coverage? Contact us today!

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Announcement: SQX Now Covers Structured Products, Yield Curves, and Volatilities

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 19:49:47 GMT

Announcement: SQX Now Covers Structured Products, Yield Curves, and Volatilities

We at SQX are excited to announce a massive increase in our data coverage.

As an organization, we aim to be an innovative leader in streamlining the flow of information across the finance industry. To realize this vision more fully than ever before, we’re adding several new products—some that are entirely new, some that expand our existing coverage. As of this summer, the new datasets we offer include new fixed-income securities (including structured products), new types of yield curves, and volatility data! We’ll have more to say about each asset class in the coming months, but let’s take a quick look at each of our new products:

Fixed Income

Our new fixed-income coverage includes common and niche asset classes—including structured products:

Agency MBS – Over 1,000,000 Mortgage-Backed Securities
ABS – Around 20,000 Asset-Backed Securities, covering a wide range of collateral types and structural features
CMBS – Approximately 23,000 Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities
CMOs – Over 265,000 Non-Agency Collateralized Mortgage Obligations
CLOs and CDOs – 20,000 Collateralized Loan Obligations, including Collateralized Debt Obligations
Syndicated Bank Loans – Around 3,000 global syndicated bank loans
“Green” Bonds – Pricing for bonds across sectors.

These new securities join our existing fixed-income offerings, which include municipal bonds , corporate/sovereign bonds , catastrophe bonds , and private bonds . For all fixed-income securities that SQX offers, we provide informational transparency, explaining the methodologies behind the valuations we create. Our new fixed-income products are backed by our responsive customer service and our flexible support team.

New Yield Curves

Our expanded yield curve coverage now includes four all-new types of curves:

Quoted Swap Curves – Bid and ask yields for a wide range of global currency
Swap-Implied Curves – Yield curves for 33 global currencies
FX Forward Curves – Quoted pricing on FX spot curves and FX forward curves across a wide range of global currency pairs
Credit Default Swap Curves – Spread curves for over 2,000 reference entities and popular indices, alongside a wide range of currency, restructuring clause, and tier of debt combinations

These four new yield curves will be provided alongside the global , corporate , and municipal yield curves we already offer. For all SQX yield curves, we provide historical data, and our pricing updates arrive on a daily or intraday basis.

Volatilities

Last but certainly not least, SQX now offers volatility data:

FX Option Volatilities – Daily volatility surfaces for FX options, including skew, across 30 global currencies and precious metals
Swaption Volatilities – Daily normalized volatility cubes for interest rate swaptions, including skew, across 20 popular global currencies

Our new volatility data has been added to our existing portfolio of derivative data . For both volatilities, we provide an updated file on an intraday or end-of-day basis. We can also supply up to 5 years of historical data, if desired.

Comprehensive Data Coverage

With these additions, SQX now delivers one of the most comprehensive and transparent data offerings in the market—spanning fixed income, yield curves, and volatility. If any of our new data offerings are interesting to you or your firm, please contact us! We’d love to share some more spe cific details. Stay tuned—we’ll be sharing deeper dives into each of these new datasets in the months ahead.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q2 2025 Review

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 22:15:17 GMT

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q2 2025 Review

Q2 was a big quarter for SQX—the biggest we’ve had in a while. Read on to hear more about our exciting new updates…

New Product: Asset-Backed Securities

As of Q2, SQX now offers pricing for a wide range of asset-backed securities! We’ve built our name on securities like muni and corporate bonds, so we’re particularly delighted to expand our fixed-income coverage. The new asset classes we provide include Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), Asset-Backed Securities (ABS), Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS), Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLO), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), Non-Agency Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO), Syndicated Bank Loans, and “Green” Bonds.

For all asset-backed securities, we offer daily-calculated prices, though we also deliver intraday valuations for more liquid bonds. As with all SQX products, our asset-backed securities come with top-tier customer service.

Added New Yield Curves

While we previously covered global, corporate, and municipal yield curves , SQX now proudly offers Quoted Swap Curves, Swap-Implied Curves, FX Forward Curves, and Credit Default Swap Curves! Each of these new types of yield curves features information sourced from around the country and around the world.

We deliver intraday updates for each type of yield curve (except CDS curves, which receive daily updates). For all our yield curves, we customize solutions to your needs and will always give you friendly, responsive customer service.

New Product: Volatilities

As if new asset-backed securities and yield curves weren’t enough, we also began offering volatilities in Q2! Our coverage includes FX Option Volatilities and Swaption Volatilities. For FX option volatilities, we supply daily volatility surfaces, including skew, across 30 global currencies and precious metals. Our swaption volatility data features daily normalized volatility cubes for interest rate swaptions (including skew) across many popular global currencies. As with all SQX products, our volatility data comes at an affordable cost.

If any of our new products intrigue you, please contact SQX for more information.

Improved our Alternative Investments Process

Continuous Improvement is one of our core SQX values. Lately, we’ve been working to make our alternative investments process better and more efficient than ever before! We’ve automated our systems that create data files and input information into our database, allowing alts prices to be seamlessly recorded and transferred to our clients.

SQX covers the full universe of alternative investments, including privately-issued securities. We provide daily price updates in a single streamlined alts file, alongside issuer-quoted information related to FINRA 2231(c).

Streamlined our Muni Bond Pricing

In Q2, our municipal bond pricing grew more efficient than ever before. We’ve taken steps to streamline and refine our municipal bond offering, which includes around 1,000,000 muni bonds. We deliver a daily-updated muni bond file, which is delivered via SFTP or API. Our prices are fully compliant, based on the prevailing market price hierarchy, as outlined in MSRB Rule G-30. To learn more about our muni bond pricing, contact us!

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Our SQX Vision

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:26:23 GMT

Our SQX Vision

“To be an innovative leader in streamlining the flow of information across the finance industry.”

Our Vision

At SQX, our vision is what drives us. We memorize it, we hang it on our office walls. We keep it in mind as we go about our day.

Our vision is: “To be an innovative leader in streamlining the flow of information across the finance industry.”

Our clients know us for being responsive, transparent, and easy to work with. We’ve built the SQX name on treating people right and delivering market data with honesty, speed, and care. But our vision is at the very center of who we are. So let’s take a closer look at what makes us tick.

A Clear Focus

Our vision helps us stand out in the world of market data vendors. Many of the firms in our space can be rigid, expensive, or slow to act. Of course, we want the financial world to see SQX as friendlier, kinder, and more effective than the giant names in the industry. But at the end of the day, we don’t define ourselves by what others get wrong. Our vision reminds us of where we’re going—becoming a data vendor who isn’t just a better alternative, but who sets the standard. We’re not here to play catch-up. We’re here to be a leader.

New Opportunities

Our vision also highlights our role in the finance industry. SQX isn’t just a data company—we’re an information company. That’s an important distinction; the scope of what we deliver goes beyond “data” alone.

Take SQX Alts for example. SQX Alts provides daily news and insights about the world of alternative investments, alongside a detailed database of alts issuers. No numbers, no NAV updates, no data files. By managing SQX Alts, we’re demonstrating that we go past raw data points, diving into what the data actually means. At SQX, we’re creating and delivering financial information in all its forms. We build custom solutions, not just datasets.

What Does This Mean in Practice?

“Innovation” and “leadership” have become buzzwords. But when we use them, we’re not speaking meaningless “corporate-ese”. It’s worth considering what these common words actually mean.

For us, innovative leadership means rethinking how data is sourced, shared, and understood. It means building systems that make life easier for analysts, advisors, and operations teams—for you, not for our bottom line. It means building a company that provides thought leadership for financial information. It means listening. It means moving fast. And most importantly, it means putting clients first—always.

Looking Ahead

SQX stands for transparency, reliability, and service that treats you like a human being. Our aim is to shape the infrastructure of modern finance—not just supply it.

We’re already making this vision real. From issuer-driven updates to exciting new data products, we’re finding new ways to help clients get the data they need, without the usual roadblocks. And we’re just getting started. If you’re looking for a market data provider who sees the bigger picture and builds for the future, we’d love to show you what’s possible.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Precise Corporate Bond Pricing in a Volatile Market

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:32:47 GMT

Precise Corporate Bond Pricing
in a Volatile Market

Corporate Bond Pricing Matters

Corporate bonds are more relevant—and more revealing—than ever. As the market adjusts to a slower Fed, credit desks are watching every basis point. High rates aren’t new anymore. With spreads still bouncing, liquidity patchy, and data quality under scrutiny, one thing is clear: how you price your bonds matters – a lot.

From investment-grade mainstays to emerging market risk, corporate debt remains a cornerstone for income, diversification, and capital structure plays. But if you’re relying on legacy pricing models—or reference data that hasn’t evolved—you might be making decisions on information that’s days (or dollars) behind. That’s where SQX comes in.

The Issue with Traditional Pricing Methods

Most corporate bonds trade over the counter. That means no official closing prices, no exchanges, and a lot of guesswork. Traditional pricing methods—like matrix pricing—rely on a handful of reference securities.

Here’s the problem: these methods assume that bonds with similar maturities or ratings will price similarly. But in a world where credit curves shift daily and callable bonds can flip valuations on a dime, that approach is quickly becoming outdated. And when those reference bonds are themselves mispriced, the whole pricing structure collapses.

SQX Pricing Methodology

At SQX, pricing isn’t an afterthought—it’s our core business. We built our corporate bond pricing engine believing that if we can measure precisely, we can price accurately.

Here’s how we do it: SQX builds a real-time yield curve using all of an issuer’s traded bonds—not just a few references—to price accurately, even without recent trades. We make intraday adjustments to reflect rate moves after a trade, and apply time-series and cross-sectional analysis to flag outliers. Unlike matrix pricing, our curve-based approach avoids spreading errors from a single bad quote.

Here's an example. Picture a long-duration corporate bond that trades early in the day at $105.90. By market close, treasury yields rise 9 bps. Most pricing services would still show $105.90. SQX adjusts—pricing it at $104.33.

What You Get: Precision and Performance

SQX corporate bond pricing will make your process smarter than ever.
We offer:

Evaluated pricing for all global corporate bonds, including high yield and emerging markets
Delivery your way via SFTP or API
Support that’s supportive – we respond promptly and resolve most issues in under 24 hours
Bond analytics across 80+ fields, including yield to worst, duration, convexity, volatility, and more

Our corporate bond pricing is backed by a team of experts who understand the ins and outs of the bond market. We aim to be as flexible as possible—if you need custom coverage, let us know!

Who Benefits from Our Corporate Bond Data?

SQX corporate bond pricing is built for everyone who can’t afford uncertainty. Portfolio managers rely on our data to calculate NAVs and match liabilities with confidence. Risk teams use our precise pricing to manage exposure and refine hedging strategies. Traders count on us for fast, accurate mark-to-market values, while operations teams depend on our reliability to meet compliance and reporting standards. If accurate corporate bond pricing is critical to your organization, SQX is an ideal resource.

Corporate Bond Pricing Built for You

SQX might not be your first pricing provider—but we might just be your best. Our mission is to price corporate bonds better, faster, and smarter than ever before. Armed with our pricing, you’ll be equipped to make sharper decisions with less guesswork. Along the way, you can expect high-value prices, top-tier customer service, and the flexibility of a team that works for you.

Want to see what makes our corporate bond pricing different? Let us know! We’d love to tell you more.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q1 2025 Review

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:35:40 GMT

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q1 2025 Review

2025 is 25% over. Read on to hear about the top 5 things that SQX has been working on in Q1…

Fruitful Muni Reference Data Feedback Groups

The preparations for our upcoming muni reference data product have been coming along nicely. In partnership with MBIS: Municipal Bond Information Services and EDI: Exchange Data International , we’ve been laying the groundwork as we target a launch in late 2025. Our reference data will include information on over 50,000 unique issuers—totaling over 1.5 million active U.S. muni bonds.

In the meantime, our market data feedback groups have begun to meet. We’ve been connecting with muni industry professionals and fixed-income experts to help us determine the types of data that will be most helpful to the market. If you’re interested, there’s still time to participate in a feedback group. Your input will help us make sure that we’re offering the types of fields, structure of fields, and universe of coverage that you want. Just let us know you’re interested, and we’ll tell you how to join.

Private Bonds Partnership Growth

Over the past few months, we’ve seen our network of private bond partners expand rapidly. As more institutional investors and lenders enter the space, SQX has become a trusted source of transparent and reliable private credit data. We’ve seen our data be used for everything from valuation and compliance to portfolio risk management. This momentum reflects not only the market’s appetite for high-quality data, but also SQX’s commitment to enabling smarter, faster decisions across the private credit landscape.

Building Retriever—An Alts Portal for Custodians

Our alternative investments pricing process is about to take a massive leap forward. In Q1, we’ve been working on a new alts pricing portal called Retriever. Retriever allows issuers to enter the prices for their securities directly into our database, via a personalized link, where they can view a complete list of their securities.

Once complete, Retriever will be perfect for Self-Directed IRAs and other alts custodians—who often struggle with pricing alts quickly and efficiently. By integrating Retriever into our own pricing process, we’ll be able to increase speed, boost efficiency, and reduce margin for error.

We’ll have more to say in the coming months, so keep an eye out for updates!

Streamlining Automation for Swaps

Since the beginning of the year, our swaps pricing has been given a major efficiency upgrade. Many years ago, SQX’s pricing for swaps consisted of manually documenting and recording prices by hand. Over time, we’ve partially automated this process, but elements of manual work have still been required.

In Q1, we’ve made progress towards automating the entire swaps pricing process—from start to finish. Once complete, we’ll have a much more streamlined system, resulting in a greatly reduced margin for error and a notably faster file delivery time.

Enhanced Alternative Investments Pricing

In Q1, our alternative investments product rose to new heights. We’ve strengthened our validation checks—particularly for publicly-issued DPPs and REITs—and refined our data entry workflows to ensure every price is reliable and up to date. These improvements mean SQX clients receive cleaner, more uniform alts files, so their teams are freed up to focus on their top priorities.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Announcing SQX Municipal Bond Reference Data – Coming Soon

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 17:23:59 GMT

Announcing SQX Municipal Bond Reference Data – Coming Soon

Muni Reference Data Matters More Than Ever

The U.S. municipal bond market is massive, complex, and getting more sophisticated by the day. With over 50,000 unique issuers and more than a million active securities, staying on top of this space requires clean, consistent, and comprehensive data.

While price discovery often takes the spotlight, reference data forms the foundation of virtually every workflow, from trading and portfolio management to compliance and reporting. And now, SQX is proud to expand our muni data solutions by introducing municipal bond reference data —delivered with the same rigorous commitment to high value, transparency, and reliability that defines our pricing business.

Announcing SQX Muni Bond Reference Data

Launching in late 2025, SQX’s municipal bond reference data is built in partnership with Exchange Data International (EDI) and Municipal Bond Information Services (MBIS) —two respected names in fixed-income data. Our dataset covers more than 1.5 million active muni bonds across 50,000+ issuers.

We’re very excited for the launch of our muni reference data later this year! But we don’t want to do it without your help. We’re hosting a muni reference data feedback group in the near future, where industry professionals will gather to discuss what they’re hoping to see from a muni reference data product.

We’re early enough in the process of shaping our muni reference data that your feedback will genuinely affect the outcome. Your input will affect the types of fields, structure of fields, and universe of coverage that we eventually offer. If you have thoughts—make your voice heard! We’ll tailor our product to meet your needs.

If you work with muni bonds, this feedback group is a one-of-a-kind opportunity. If you have any interest in SQX muni reference data, you won’t want to miss it. Just let us know you’re interested , and we’ll add you to the list.

Why Is Muni Reference Data So Hard to Get Right?

The municipal market is unique—in both positive and negative ways! It’s highly fragmented, with small issuers, unique bond structures, and inconsistent disclosure practices. Many issues are one-off deals, with different covenants, amortization schedules, or tax treatments. What’s “standard” can vary from state to state and region to region.

As a result, collecting and maintaining reference data at scale is a tough job. Data sources vary in format, quality, and timeliness. Manual entry and reconciliation still plague many workflows, increasing operational risk and draining valuable time. For firms managing large portfolios or building data-driven tools, keeping muni reference data clean and current can become a full-time job.

Unfortunately, the state of the industry isn’t particularly promising. High-quality data is hard to find, unless you’re willing to pay an arm and a leg. The cost of worthwhile muni reference data is high—and getting higher. We think the muni industry deserves better. That’s why we decided to step in.

Built on Our Core Strength: Pricing

At SQX, we’ve earned our reputation by pricing the muni market accurately, affordably, and at scale. Every day, we price a universe of roughly 1,000,000 municipal bonds, applying a pricing methodology grounded in real market inputs (including recent trades, bids and offers, historical comparisons, peer bonds, and curve pricing).

We update prices daily, resolve most customer issues within 24 hours, and provide complete transparency—you’ll always see the market inputs and logic behind each price. Our process aligns with MSRB Rule G-30, ensuring full compliance. Bringing this same discipline to muni reference data was the natural next step.

If you’re interested in SQX muni reference data , keep an eye out for future updates! As we get closer to launch date, we’ll definitely have more to say. In the meantime, if you expect to benefit from SQX muni reference data, make sure you contact us ! We’ll be happy to answer your questions or add you to our muni reference data feedback group.

With your help, let’s make the world of muni reference data better than ever before.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Rethinking SWOT Analysis for Fintech’s Future: A More Human Approach

todds@sqx.com (Todd Spencer) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:03:19 GMT

Rethinking SWOT Analysis for Fintech’s Future: A More Human Approach

Upgrading SWOT Analysis

At SQX, we believe every tool and framework we use should be as dynamic and forward-thinking as the people we serve. That’s why we’ve reimagined the classic SWOT analysis into something that feels less like a static checklist and more like a living, breathing conversation about where you are and where you want to go. For fintech leaders navigating a whirlwind of change, our evolved SWOT framework isn’t just about identifying challenges – it’s about embracing opportunities and charting a path to your future self.

Transformation in Action: The “InvestEase” Example

Let’s look at how this future-focused lens can work in the real world. Take “InvestEase,” a fictional app created to make investing simple, affordable, and accessible for millennials. By using our forward-thinking SWOT analysis, InvestEase can see not just where it stands today, but where it’s headed.

What’s Working Today: InvestEase’s Strengths

A sleek, user-friendly interface that’s perfect for tech-savvy millennials.
Low fees that make investing accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy.
Partnerships with est ablished financial institutions that inspire trust.

What’s Possible Tomorrow: InvestEase’s Opportunities

Expanding into ESG-driven investment options to connect with millennial values.
Leveraging AI to create personalized investment strategies for every user.
Partnering with influencers who can help reach a digital-native audience.

What Needs Attention Now: InvestEase’s Weaknesses

A brand that’s still finding its footing in a crowded market.
Dependence on third-party data streams, which could slow innovation.
A support team that’s stretched thin as the company grows.

What Could Get in the Way: InvestEase’s Threats

Competition from fintech giants with de eper pockets and feature-rich offerings.
Regulatory changes that could make costs harder to control.
Economic downturns that might make millennials less likely to invest.

Why This Matters: A Framework for Action

A traditional SWOT analysis often feels like it’s stuck in the now, focusing on what’s already happening instead of what’s possible. At SQX, we don’t think that’s good enough – especially in an industry like fintech, where tomorrow is coming fast. Our approach is built for action, not just reflection, because we know that’s what it takes to thrive.

By aligning a company’s current strengths and weaknesses with its future opportunities and threats, leaders get a clearer, more actionable picture. You’re not just identifying challenges – you’re planning for them. You’re not just celebrating strengths – you’re building on them.

The Road Ahead

Fintech thrives on innovation, and so should the tools you use to plan your next move. At SQX, we’re not here to tell you how to do things our way – we’re here to help you succeed your way. Our future-focused SWOT analysis is one small piece of that puzzle, designed to help you think bigger, move faster, and stay ahead in a world that never slows down. For is, the important thing isn't being right. It’s about helping you get where you want to go. Let’s do it together.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

SQX 2024 Year-In-Review

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 21:41:43 GMT

SQX 2024 Year-in-Review

Note from the CEO

At SQX, continuous improvement is not only one of our key values—it’s the foundation of how we serve you. Continuous improvement means that we never stop refining our processes to make them faster, smoother, and better able to support you. But it’s also about growth—looking for opportunities to meet needs in new and creative ways.

In 2024, our core SQX products improved significantly. We laid the foundation for offering muni reference data. We began providing yield curves, giving you access to data on global curves, corporate curves, and municipal curves. And we hit a fun milestone with our structured note pricing.

But continuous improvement also took a surprising form—we launched two brand-new organizations under the SQX umbrella! SQX Alts features daily alternative investments news and information. SQX Bonds offers corporate bond data for the world of retail investing.

We know that none of this would be possible without your trust and support in 2024. We can’t wait to continue our pursuit of continuous improvement as the calendar shifts to 2025! Thank you for being part of our journey.

—Timothy Tatum, CEO of Securities Quote Xchange

Muni Reference Data Coming Soon

In Q4 2024, we laid the foundations for an exciting new service: municipal bond reference data ! This initiative, developed in collaboration with our partners Municipal Bond Information Services ( MBIS ) and Exchange Data International ( EDI ), is set to launch in late 2025. Once this product is available, our clients will have access to high-quality reference data on over 1.5 million active U.S. muni bond issues from over 50,000 different issuers.

Our muni reference data will include essential information like bond terms, ratings, maturity dates, and issuance details, empowering clients to make more informed decisions and streamline compliance workflows. By combining this reference data with our existing pricing solutions, clients will have all the tools they need to navigate the complex muni bond landscape. Keep an eye on our future newsletters—we’ll have more muni reference data updates coming later this year.

SQX Covers 100,000 Structured Notes

In 2024, SQX reached a very important milestone for our structured note coverage: we now officially price over 100,000 structured notes! Reaching this milestone cements our position as the data vendor with the largest structured note coverage in the U.S., a title we hold thanks to our vast network of domestic and international dealers.

For our clients, this achievement means access to an even broader and more comprehensive dataset. Financial institutions can rely on SQX to deliver accurate, broker-quoted pricing for even the most complex and customized structured notes. SQX offers our structured notes clients regular intraday updates, customizable delivery options, and a single consolidated file, empowering them to efficiently manage their structured note investments.

As our universe of structured notes continues to expand, SQX remains committed to providing high-quality structured note data files that our clients can count on.

Added Yield Curves

In 2024, SQX released three new yield curve products! Our coverage includes global curves, corporate curves, and municipal curves.

Our global curves include data from 70 countries, spanning the full yield curve from overnight rates to long-term bond yields. SQX corporate curves cover a wide range of credit ratings (AAA to CCC), with full transparency into the constituents behind each curve. For municipal curves , our transparent, data-driven curves incorporate real-time market activity to ensure precise and accurate pricing.

With the addition of yield curves, we continue our mission to empower clients with timely, reliable, and comprehensive pricing data.

Introducing SQX Alts

In April 2024, we introduced SQX Alts , our new platform for alternative investments news and information. If you’re in the alts world, SQX Alts is built to simplify how you stay informed.

SQX Alts features daily articles that highlight recent developments with major issuers and sponsors. Site visitors can also browse a detailed directory of sponsors, sponsor-specific news articles, and publicly-issued securities. SQX Alts also includes an “announcements” feed, designed to keep you ahead of the curve. Instead of scouring the SEC website for updates, you can now find all the recent SEC filings from major alts issuers and sponsors in a single accessible list of announcements.

SQX Alts is just beginning to take off. As this website grows, we believe that SQX Alts will become the go-to resource for anyone who works with alts, whether you’re an investor, asset manager, custodian, issuer, or sponsor. Keep an eye out for more updates! We’re very excited for what’s ahead for SQX Alts in 2025…

Introducing SQX Bonds

In early 2024, SQX announced the release of SQX Bonds , a new web app that offers free fixed-income data for retail investors. Leveraging SQX’s high-quality bond data, SQX Bonds provides an open-access database that includes over 170,000 global corporate bonds and structured notes.

Retail investors often struggle with high costs and limited access to essential market information. SQX Bonds aims to address these barriers with free daily pricing updates, market yields, and historical price data for the bonds that interest them. Users can also create a free account to unlock advanced analytics, build fantasy portfolios, and join a discussion with other site users—all aimed at refining their investment strategies without incurring any costs.

SQX Bonds aims to set a new standard for retail fixed-income investing by making detailed financial insights available to everyone.

SQX would not be the organization it is today without you. Thank you for walking alongside us as we continue our journey of continuous improvement into 2025! To stay in the loop, make sure you follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter . We’re grateful that you’ve been a part of the SQX story.

Understanding Catastrophe Bonds

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:54:48 GMT

Understanding Catastrophe Bonds

A Risk-Linked Security

Major disasters are difficult to predict, and even harder to prevent. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, cyberattacks—the list goes on. These calamities are becoming increasingly common and costly, giving catastrophe bonds (or cat bonds) a growing role in the fixed-income market. These risk-linked securities not only offer high yields but also provide diversification benefits, since they are largely uncorrelated with traditional market risks. For fixed-income professionals, understanding and leveraging cat bonds can unlock unique opportunities in portfolio construction.

What Are Catastrophe Bonds?

Catastrophe bonds are essentially insurance for insurance agencies. These specialized financial instruments transfer catastrophe risk from the insurance companies or government entities that issue the bonds to investors. In exchange for taking on this risk, investors receive regular coupon payments and a return of principal at maturity—assuming no triggering event (a “catastrophe”), occurs during the bond’s life.

Cat bonds are designed to help issuers manage risk while offering investors an attractive alternative investment. For example, a reinsurer might issue a cat bond to protect against losses from hurricanes. If a qualifying hurricane occurs, the bond’s proceeds are used to cover losses instead of being returned to investors.

The above chart displays a sample display of SQX Cat bond data

Why Cat Bonds Matter for Fixed-Income Portfolios

Cat bonds are very appealing to investors seeking non-correlated returns and diversification. Because their performance is tied to natural events rather than financial markets, they can provide stability during periods of market volatility. Additionally, their high yields make them attractive to investors seeking enhanced returns. As they say, “high risk, high reward.”

For fixed-income professionals, incorporating cat bonds into a portfolio requires a deep understanding of the risks, opportunities, and underlying data. Reliable data is crucial to making informed decisions and avoiding pitfalls.

Essential Cat Bonds Data Fields

SQX is proud to provide catastrophe bond information. We offer a daily-updated file with both pricing data and reference data for cat bonds—ensuring that our clients always have up-to-date information. Our cat bond file includes the below data fields:

Description : A brief summary of the bond, often including details about the sponsor, covered perils (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes), and geographic focus.
Size : The total issuance amount, reflecting the scale and importance of the bond in the market.
Notional Outstanding : The remaining principal amount of the bond. This figure helps gauge the bond’s liquidity and market activity.
Stated Coupon : The interest rate the bond pays to investors, expressed as a percentage of the notional amount.
Pricing Date : The date the bond’s pricing information was last updated.
ISIN (International Securities Identification Number) : A unique 12-character identifier.
Maturity Date : The bond’s expiration date, when the principal is repaid—assuming no triggering event occurs.
Bid Price/Ask Price : The prices at which buyers are willing to purchase and sellers are willing to sell the bond. These provide insight into market liquidity and sentiment.
Bid Spread/Ask Spread : The yield margins relative to a reference rate (e.g. SOFR) that buyers and sellers are willing to accept.
Mid Price/Mid Spread : The average of bid and ask values, representing a fair market estimate of the bond’s price and yield.
Attachment Probability : The likelihood that losses will reach the bond’s attachment point, triggering a payout to the issuer. A higher attachment probability indicates greater risk.
Expected Loss : A key metric indicating the anticipated percentage loss of the bond’s principal due to triggering events.
Trigger Type : The mechanism that determines if the bond is triggered. Common triggers include:
Indemnity : Based on the issuer’s actual losses.
Parametric : Based on measurable parameters, like wind speed or earthquake magnitude.
Modelled Loss : Based on simulations of potential losses.
Industry Loss : Based on industry-wide loss estimates.
Hybrid : A combination of triggers.
Risk : A summary measure of the bond’s risk level, incorporating attachment probability, expected loss, and trigger type.

Conclusion

Catastrophe bonds are an innovative asset class in the fixed-income world. With their unique risk-reward profile and diversification benefits, they can be a valuable addition to any portfolio. However, understanding their nuances and risks is essential. As cat bonds become increasingly relevant, investors armed with SQX’s cat bond pricing and reference data will be equipped to confidently navigate this intricate and specialized market.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Private Credit: On the Rise

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 18:50:41 GMT

Private Credit: On the Rise

An Ascending Asset Class

Private credit has become one of the fastest-growing asset classes in modern finance, stepping in to fill the gap left by traditional bank lending. Once considered a niche market, private credit is on track to grow to $2.8 trillion by 2028, up from $1.5 trillion in 2024 ¹ . The picture couldn’t be clearer: private credit is poised to play a vital role in offering tailored financing solutions to borrowers and delivering attractive, risk-adjusted returns for investors. As this market expands, the need for accurate, reliable private credit pricing data will become more important than ever before.

What’s Driving Private Credit’s Growth?

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis marked a turning point for private credit. Stricter banking regulations left many companies underserved, creating an opportunity for private lenders to step in. These institutions offer flexible, customized financing options that can accommodate unique borrower needs, such as transaction size, structure, or timing.

For investors, one of the most appealing features of private credit is its use of floating interest rates, which adjust in real time with benchmark rate changes. This makes it an effective hedge against inflation and rising rates. Additionally, private credit offers higher yields than many traditional fixed-income investments (such as bonds), due to the illiquidity premium and credit risk taken on by investors. In today’s high-rate environment, private credit’s speed, certainty, and adaptability have made it a go-to solution for investors seeking alternatives to traditional bank financing.

Why Are Investors Turning to Private Credit?

Private credit offers a number of appealing features for investors, including a combination of higher returns, diversification, and lower volatility. Direct lending, the most prevalent private credit strategy, has consistently outperformed leveraged loans and high-yield bonds, particularly in periods of rising interest rates. From 2008 to 2023, direct lending delivered average returns of 11.6%. Rather impressive, when you consider that the returns for leveraged loans and high-yield bonds were 5% and 6.8% respectively ¹ .

Additionally, private credit is perfect for portfolio diversification. Since it has such a low correlation to public markets, private bonds can help reduce volatility and improve risk-adjusted returns. Historical data also suggests that private credit has shown resilience, with lower loss rates than many public fixed-income instruments. These characteristics make it an attractive option for institutional investors seeking to enhance their portfolios.

Challenges and Opportunities

As private credit continues its meteoric rise, private credit investors face a mix of challenges and opportunities. Rising interest rates and economic uncertainty highlight the need for rigorous risk assessment and proactive liquidity management—particularly as tighter credit conditions may lead to increased borrower defaults. However, these same pressures can create attractive opportunities. Rescue financing, junior capital solutions, and bespoke lending structures enable investors to target higher yields from the borrowers’ unique challenges. As these trends continue, the potential for investors to grow and adapt in this space remains vast.

SQX: Supporting the Private Credit Ecosystem

The private credit market is poised for expansion. But this growth is only possible with the aid of accurate financial data—particularly for pricing private bonds—which are critical for risk management and compliance. SQX is a trusted partner in this evolving landscape, offering precise and transparent private bond pricing, secure data delivery via SFTP or API, and industry-leading customer service. With our commitment to transparency and responsiveness, SQX ensures financial institutions are equipped with the tools they need to navigate the evolving landscape of private credit.

As private credit continues to reshape the financial industry, partners like SQX will remain integral to its success, providing the foundational data required to support this rising market.

¹ “ Understanding Private Credit,” Morgan Stanley. Jun 20, 2024.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q3 2024 Review

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 17:46:29 GMT

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q3 2024 Review

Crisp autumn air is blowing, leaves are falling, and SQX has been hard at work. As we move into the fall, let’s take a look at what we’ve accomplished in Q3.

Over 100,000 Structured Notes Priced

While SQX is constantly expanding our universe of structured notes , we just reached a very important milestone. As of Q3, SQX now officially prices over 100,000 structured notes! Though our structured note coverage was already the largest in the US, we’re very excited to reach this milestone.

In Q3, we also partnered with a new broker! This new addition to our coverage expands our global network of domestic and foreign dealers, providing SQX with more pricing data to aggregate. This data is then parsed and formatted into a consolidated file, which we deliver to our structured note clients on an intraday basis.

SQX Alts now features SEC Announcements

SQX Alts —our new platform for alternative investments news and information—just introduced a whole new way to view SEC filings. In Q3, we created a page that gathers the most recent SEC filings from major alts issuers and sponsors, compiling them into a single easy-to-read list of announcements. If a particular filing interests you, each individual listing includes a link to the document itself.

Also in Q3, we’ve dramatically filled out the SQX Alts database, providing a broader list of alts sponsors and issuers. These updates are a significant step towards making SQX Alts the go-to resource for the alts world.

Refined our Alts Pricing Process

In Q3, we’ve made our alternative investment pricing process more streamlined than ever before. We’ve expanded validation procedures for our alts pricing, ensuring that our data entry process is efficient and consistent.

SQX offers pricing for the full universe of alternative investments —including privately-issued securities. We provide issuer-quoted data in a single daily-delivered file. Thanks to our recent updates, our alts pricing efficiency is at an all-time high.

New Product Spotlight: Muni Curves

We’ve officially re-launched our muni curves in Q3, courtesy of our sister company MBIS , Municipal Bond Information Services !
Our data includes the Muni Benchmark Curve, Investment Grade Credit Curves, and Insured Spread Curves.
SQX muni curves incorporate data from market activity, ensuring that our model accurately reflects all of the available information.
In addition, these muni curves help SQX price municipal bonds more accurately than ever before.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Structured Note Pricing: The SQX Difference

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:51:20 GMT

Structured Note Pricing: The SQX Difference

A Popular Option

Structured notes are on the rise. In recent years, investors have been seeking customized solutions that blend fixed-income and equity features. Increasingly, they’re turning to structured notes to meet these needs. However, pricing these complex instruments is one of the greatest challenges for financial institutions. Going to big data vendors won’t help you (unless you like sky-high prices and terrible service).

SQX offers the premier option for broker-quoted structured notes pricing. We specialize in providing comprehensive and customizable pricing solutions for structured notes. Let’s dig into some details.

Comprehensive Coverage

The most obvious feature that makes SQX structured note pricing unique is our extensive coverage. It’s the largest in the U.S. We’re pretty proud of this. Our comprehensive broker network includes both domestic and international sell-side desks, enabling SQX to aggregate broker-quoted prices on over 100,000 structured notes.

Because structured notes are highly customizable, with varying terms tied to market indices, commodities, or interest rates, pricing can be complex and inconsistent across sources. SQX receives prices directly from our large global network of issuers, ensuring that our clients receive the most accurate prices available. This level of coverage provides our clients with a more accurate, well-rounded picture.

Intraday Updates

The conditions of the structured note market can change at the blink of an eye. If you don’t get timely updates, you’ll fall behind. SQX’s pricing updates make sure this doesn’t happen. Our clients count on receiving up-to-date information for our full universe of structured notes—letting them react to market movements with lightning speed. We receive pricing files from brokers throughout the day, allowing clients to receive ether end-of-day or intraday updates. If the price has changed since the last update, you’ll know about it.

Clients receive these updates through secure accounts, with the data delivered via SFTP or API, depending on what best fits your needs. Whether it’s responding to market volatility or making strategic decisions on structured note portfolios, these updates allow asset managers and investment advisors to stay nimble and informed. When you partner with SQX, we make sure that you’re always a step ahead.

The Power of Customization

One size never fits all. SQX knows this better than anyone. That’s why we offer highly customizable pricing solutions tailored to each client’s specific needs. Institutions can fine-tune their services with:

Custom security inclusion criteria: Focus on what matters to you.
Custom price selection logic: Choose how prices from multiple brokers are selected and prioritized.
Custom file formats: Seamlessly integrate data into your systems with secure SFTP or API file transfer.
Custom delivery options: Receive data on an end-of-day or intraday basis.

This means that whether you’re an investment bank, hedge fund, or insurance company, SQX delivers exactly the data you need, in the format that best fits your workflow. Precise data management can make or break compliance efforts. This sort of flexibility is crucial.

Customer-Centric Service

Many financial data vendors only focus on the numbers. But around here, we know that we’re ultimately working with people, not institutions. We’re dedicated to treating our clients like human beings, not walking checkbooks.

If you reach out to us, we’ll respond promptly. As in, less-than-24-hours promptly. You will never—repeat, never—be left wondering if we got your message. In an industry where delayed support can cause harmful ripple effects, this commitment to rapid response is crucial. What’s more, we’re always friendly, patient, and kind. Working with a data provider who’s a good listener makes a pretty big difference. SQX’s customer-first approach means you don’t just get a service—you get a partnership.

Why Choose SQX for Structured Note Pricing?

When it comes to structured note pricing, you need accuracy, timeliness, and customization. SQX gives you all of the above. We make it our mission to ensure that our structured note clients are getting not merely data, but data tailored to their needs, delivered securely and quickly. It’s no wonder so many financial institutions have turned to SQX for their structured note pricing. If you’re looking for a partner with comprehensive broker coverage, intraday updates, and affordable prices, SQX is the vendor for you.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

6 Reasons to go with SQX

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 17:37:01 GMT

6 Reasons to Go with SQX

Picking the Right Data Vendor

When it comes to financial data vendors, the market is crowded with options. Picking the wrong vendor can force you to weather overinflated prices, terrible communication, and no flexibility. And since it’s so difficult to change data vendors, you can find yourself locked in for years. When the stakes are so high, it can be challenging to determine which vendor offers the best fit for your institution’s needs. So why should you choose SQX? We’ve got six reasons for you.

1: Transparency

A major challenge in the financial data industry is understanding the origin of pricing data. Many big data vendors don’t share how the prices you receive were created, leaving you to blindly trust them. You’ll just have to hope that they aren’t disguising old prices as new ones (as some big data vendors have a history of doing).

With SQX, this worry becomes a thing of the past. We ensure that you’re always in the know. If you’re after our quoted prices (structured notes, alternative investments, and catastrophe bonds), we’ll give you all the info you need, including the data’s source and age. For SQX-evaluated prices (muni bonds, corporate bonds, U.S. treasuries, and global yield curves), we’re always willing to share the relevant details behind the prices you receive, giving you clear insights into the “how” and “why” behind every piece of data.

2: Coverage

When you think of SQX’s coverage, one word comes to mind: comprehensive. In an industry where every asset class has its nuances, it’s essential to cover a wide range of securities. Fortunately, SQX meets this goal in spades, pricing both common and niche asset classes.

For example, SQX offers…

Roughly 1,000,000 muni bonds
Both privately- and publicly-issued alternative investments
Coverage of all global corporate bonds in major indexes
The most comprehensive broker coverage in the U.S. for structured notes

At SQX, we always work to ensure that you have access to the information you need, no matter how specific or specialized.

3: Customization

No two organizations are alike, and neither are their data needs. But whether you represent a hedge fund seeking to gain a competitive edge, a money manager considering the best ways to manage your assets, or a broker looking to establish rates, SQX has got you covered. We offer bespoke services that cater to your individual requirements, whether you need specific pricing data, tailored reports, or custom file delivery formats (SFTP or API). Our flexibility means that you don’t have to settle for one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, you can get the exact data and services that align with your institution’s goals and processes.

4: Value

In a market dominated by big data vendors with equally big price tags, SQX is doing something revolutionary: not charging you an arm and a leg. Our value proposition is simple: deliver top-tier data without the exorbitant costs. Let’s spell it out: “SQX’s data is as good or better than anyone else’s. SQX charges substantially lower prices.” Since we provide high-quality data at a reasonable cost, SQX is not only a smart choice for your data needs but also a cost-effective one.

5: Swift Support

Helpful customer service is like oxygen—you only notice it when it’s not there. At SQX, we pride ourselves on having some of the best customer service in the business. You can always count on getting a response from us within a single business day—most of the time it takes us less than an hour! We’re always friendly, attentive, and respectful. You’ll be taken seriously; your questions will be addressed promptly and professionally. Our goal is to make your processes feel like a breath of fresh air.

6: Licensing

Few things are as needlessly expensive as data redistribution rights. In today’s interconnected world, sharing data within your institution—or even with partners—is often necessary. However, most big data vendors charge you a truly outrageous fee to bring your organization’s data redistribution into the 21st century. At SQX, that’s not how we roll. Our licensing terms are designed to be generous, flexible, and accommodating, ensuring that you can use and share the data you need without facing unnecessary hurdles or exorbitant fees.

A Crucial Choice

Choosing the right financial data vendor is critical to the success of your institution. At SQX, we’re here to provide you with the data you need, how and when you need it, all while delivering exceptional value. When you go with SQX, you’ll experience the difference that a truly customer-focused financial data provider can make.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q2 2024 Review

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 18:17:35 GMT

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q2 2024 Review

We’ve reached the halfway point of 2024! The past three months have been very busy for SQX. Let’s take a look at what we’ve been up to in Q2.

Expanded Muni Bond API Gateway

This quarter, we’ve expanded our municipal bond API gateway like never before. Our updates have enhanced the API gateway’s ability to handle large volumes of identifiers efficiently, significantly boosting speed and responsiveness. As we move into the second half of 2024, SQX is working to expand API access for our other products as well. Many of our products have entered the testing phase already!

Launched SQX Alts

In April 2024, SQX officially launched SQX Alts , a new web platform for alternative investments news and information. SQX Alts delivers daily articles on the world of alternative investments, offering relevant, timely updates about the news that interests alts investors.

Additionally, SQX Alts features a detailed database of alternative investments information, alongside a directory of sponsors, publicly-issued securities, and news articles relevant to specific sponsors.

Our journey with SQX Alts is just beginning. We believe this website will become the go-to resource for anyone in the alts world, whether they’re an investor, asset-manager, custodian, issuer, or sponsor. We’re very excited for what’s ahead—stay tuned for future updates as SQX Alts grows and evolves!

New Alts Manager: Chris Lapeyre

Chris Lapeyre, our senior project manager, has taken on a new role: alternative investments team leader! With Chris at the helm, our alts pricing process has become more precise and efficient than ever before.

In Q2, we’ve solidified our alts process to better provide issuer-quoted information related to FINRA 2231(c). SQX provides coverage for the full universe of alternative investments, including privately-issued securities. We’re excited to watch this product grow under Chris’ leadership!

Corporate Bond Pricing for SQX Bonds

In Q2, SQX has continued to supply evaluated corporate bond pricing to SQX Bonds (formerly known as Shibui Markets)—a new web app for retail fixed-income investors. On a daily basis, SQX provides the SQX Bonds database with daily-updated pricing data on over 170,000 securities, including structured notes.

SQX Bonds’ open-access database displays SQX’s data to retail investors, providing them with free access to daily pricing updates, market yields, and historical price data. While this information was previously difficult for retail investors to access (or was locked behind a paywall), SQX Bonds makes SQX’s institutional data available to investors around the world.

Expanding University of Chicago Partnership

In partnership with the University of Chicago , SQX muni evaluations are in the process of becoming available for graduate research. The University of Chicago is launching a portal where graduate students can access financial market data to support their research projects. Once details are finalized, SQX municipal bond data (as well as the bid/offer stack from our sister company MBIS ) will be available on this portal.

SQX municipal pricing data is calculated with our transparent waterfall approach, utilizing a wealth of market and pre-market data. We’re excited for the chance to expand our Universit y of Chicago collaboration, which not only supports academic research but also highlights the practical applications and value of municipal bond evaluations in the financial sector.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Municipal Bond Pricing: The SQX Difference

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 20:32:49 GMT

Municipal Bond Pricing: The SQX Difference

The Municipal Bond Pricing Challenge

In Muniland, information is everything. Unlike other fixed-income securities, municipal bonds often suffer from low liquidity and infrequent trades, making it uniquely difficult to value them. The diversity among municipal bonds—ranging from general obligation bonds to revenue bonds—makes the situation even more complicated.

Unfortunately, getting muni bond data from the big data vendors can be deeply unsatisfying. Their pricing methods don’t always use all available data—their traditional methods (like bootstrapping and interpolation) can miss critical details, increasing risk. Just as bad, other data vendors often lack transparency while charging exorbitantly high prices. We find this situation frustrating too.

SQX exists to offer a new way to get municipal bond data. We believe that muni bond pricing should be accurate, transparent, and flexible. Data vendors shouldn’t be content with merely meeting the industry standard, but should seek excellence in every way. Let’s talk about how SQX pursues this goal.

Our Muni Pricing Methodology

SQX uses an MSRB-Rule-G-30-compliant waterfall of methodologies to calculate prevailing market price. Here's how each methodology works.

Tier 1 - Recent Trades:

SQX begins with direct pricing, using the most recent trades within the last 30 days. Adjustments are made for the trade side (bid or offer), lot size (retail or institutional), and rate movements since the trade. This tier ensures that the freshest market data is utilized.

Tier 2 - Bids and Offers:

If the bond hasn’t traded in the last 30 days, we select the best quotes (bids or offers) from the last 30 days instead. Similar adjustments for trade side, lot size, and rate movements are applied. Using this data helps provide a more complete picture than actual trades alone. SQX is proud to use bid/offer data from Municipal Bond Information Services ( MBIS ).

Tier 3 - Historical Spread Model:

If there’s been no recent market activity at all, SQX uses historical pricing data from market participants, adjusting for trade side, lot size, and rate movements. The most appropriate yield curve is selected, providing a refined historical perspective that leads to more accurate valuations.

Tier 4 - Peer Pricing Model:

If historical data is limited, we select similar “peer” bonds with recent market observations. Adjustments are made for yield, maturity, and credit differences between the bond and its peer. This tier ensures that even when direct data is scarce, comparable bonds can offer a reliable pricing reference.

Tier 5 - Curve Pricing:

When no direct market data or suitable peers are available, SQX applies curve pricing. This method uses the bond’s credit rating and sector to find the most appropriate yield curve. Adjustments are then made to align the yield with the bond’s specific characteristics.

Through this meticulous five-tier process, SQX ensures that our clients are always being given the most accurate price available. We’ll never use a Tier 4 price if there’s a Tier 1, 2, or 3 available, for instance.

Complete Muni Bond Pricing Transparency

But how can you be sure? Muni bond valuations from big data vendors are shrouded in secrecy—needing to operate in the dark is expected. You’ll just have to take our word that we’re giving you the best price, right?

Wrong. At SQX, we provide complete pricing transparency on every price you receive. Unlike some providers who may obscure their methods, our daily file includes the pricing tier for each security, followed by all the input data, supporting values, and intermediate results for each price. For every single muni bond valuation, you’ll know exactly how that price was created and what tier we used to do it. That’s quite the change of pace.

The SQX Difference

What’s even more remarkable than knowing how your valuations were created? Not having to pay an arm and a leg. SQX’s muni bond coverage is always affordable, providing high-quality data without the exorbitant costs that often plague the industry. The only thing better than getting great coverage is getting great coverage for less money.

At SQX, we cover an extensive universe of roughly 1,000,000 municipal bonds. We make our muni bond clients munillionaires—wealthy with municipal bond data! For each of the muni bonds we price, no matter how niche, we offer daily pricing updates, delivered via SFTP or API. Our clients can count on receiving updated, accurate data in real time.

Our muni bond clients receive more than just prices, however. At SQX, we pride ourselves on offering some of the best customer service in the business. Our friendly support team always responds within a single business day (usually within a single hour). If a client has a need, we drop everything to make sure it’s met. When was the last time you saw that kind of service from a big data vendor?

SQX is here to be a different sort of municipal bond data vendor. If you’re interested in transparent muni valuations, constant updates, exceptional customer service, and affordable prices, look no further than SQX.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Helping Banks Break Free

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Wed, 15 May 2024 20:49:26 GMT

Helping Banks Break Free

The Foundation of Banking

Banks need a steady stream of financial data. This data is nothing less than the lifeblood of financial institutions, fueling informed decisions, risk assessments, strategic investments, and financial statements for assets under management.

But though banks are built on a foundation of high-quality data, banks don’t often reevaluate or audit their data sources. Once they’ve found an initial data supplier, it’s easy for banks to stay in their comfort zone. After the onboarding process, they stick to their existing relationships, letting their attention stray elsewhere. But where banks get their data matters more than you might think.

Unfortunately, lack of attention can come at a steep cost. Big data vendors often charge inflated prices and provide subpar customer service. Since banks rarely reevaluate their relationships with big data vendors, they find themselves—whether knowingly or not—stuck in a rut. Many banks are caught in a cycle of convenience over quality—they stick with the pricing provider they’ve “always used,” and are hindered from exploring more efficient and economical options. But what if there was a way to get out of the rut?

A Fresh Approach to Financial Data

SQX: Securities Quote Xchange aims to disrupt the way banks get their financial data. SQX provides evaluated pricing for municipal bonds, corporate bonds, U. S. treasuries, and global yield curves (sovereign, corporate, U.S. municipal), as well as broker/issuer quoted pricing on structured notes, alternative investments, and catastrophe bonds. Regardless of the type of data banks need, we’re committed to providing comprehensive, accurate data at a fraction of the prices big data vendors charge. Choosing SQX as a data provider won’t break the bank (pun intended). But cost-efficiency is just the tip of the iceberg.

When a bank partners with SQX, they receive more than just data. SQX goes above and beyond to ensure satisfaction, providing full informational transparency. For quoted prices, SQX always shares the information’s source and age. For evaluated prices, banks know exactly how their valuation was created. For all prices, SQX always provides access to a detailed audit trail.

Overcoming the Challenge of Switching Providers

Of course, we don’t want to undersell how difficult it can be to switch data providers. When you’re driving a wagon down a muddy road, it’s hard to break free of the well-worn tracks. SQX understands how daunting the transition process can be, so we’ve streamlined it as much as possible. Whether banks find SFTP or API more helpful, the data delivery process is always tailored to the bank’s needs.

Even more importantly, we offer some of the best customer service in the business. If banks have a question at any point, SQX responds within a single business day. Most of the time, we respond within a single hour. Support isn’t just an afterthought for us; it's an integral part of the transition process, ensuring that banks have a smooth, hassle-free shift to SQX.

Don’t Settle for Less

Banks shouldn't settle for less. Sticking with a mediocre data vendor can significantly hamper banks’ efficiency, profitability, and decision-making processes. While it does take a great deal of effort for banks to switch data providers, the hidden costs of working with subpar data vendors eventually outweigh the expense of finding a new vendor. With SQX, banks have an opportunity to break free from the status quo and embrace a data provider that aligns with their need for accuracy, transparency, cost-effectiveness, and responsive support. Transitioning to a new data provider may create some pain in the short-term, but the long-term benefits are crystal-clear.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q1 2024 Review

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 20:42:17 GMT

Ahead of the Curve: SQX Q1 2024 Review

2024 is well underway, and SQX has been hard at work! We’re excited to share what SQX has been up to in the past months.

New Product Spotlight: Global Curves

We are excited to launch global yield curves that offer up-to-date information from around the world. Our zero-coupon curves include interest rates for government bonds from 70 countries.
SQX coverage includes the full yield curve, from overnight rates to long-term bond yields.

New Product Spotlight: Corporate Curves

In Q1, SQX officially launched our corporate curves product, offering coverage over a wide range of credit ratings (AAA-CCC).
Our corporate curves are fully transparent — we share a full list of constituents for each curve.

Introducing Shibui Markets

In March 2024, SQX officially launched Shibui Markets — a new web app that offers free fixed-income data for retail investors. Powered by SQX’s high-quality data, Shibui features an open-access database of over 160,000 global corporate bonds and structured notes.

While many retail investors face high access costs or limited availability of critical market data, Shibui provides users with free access to daily pricing updates, market yields, and historical price data on the bonds that interest them. With a free user account, investors can access advanced analytics, create fantasy portfolios, and engage in vibrant discussions, enhancing their investment strategies without any cost.

Shibui Markets represents a transformative shift in retail fixed-income investing, making detailed financial information readily accessible to all.

Note: Shibui Markets is now known as SQX Bonds

Increasing Demand for Best Execution Data

In Q1 2024, SQX noticed an increasing demand for the use of our data for best execution. In the past months, several of our clients have noted the value and effectiveness of our corporate and municipal bond data, and have begun using it for their best-execution practices. In particular, we’ve seen increased use of trade/pre-trade data and evaluated prices for fixed-income best execution.

Expansion of University of Chicago Partnership

In Q1, SQX has been in talks with the University of Chicago to make our muni evaluations available for graduate students. This partnership will involve creating a University of Chicago portal to allow graduate students to access financial market data to support their research projects. The data featured will include SQX municipal bond pricing data — calculated with our proprietary, MSRB-compatible, market-driven approach — as well as the bid/offer stack from our sister company MBIS .

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

SQX Introduces Shibui Markets for Retail Fixed-Income Investors

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 21:25:56 GMT

SQX Introduces Shibui Markets for Retail Fixed-Income Investors

Author's note: Shibui Markets is now known as SQX Bonds

A New Way to Trade

SQX is proud to announce Shibui Markets, a revolutionary new fixed-income web app! Shibui exists to share SQX’s high-quality data on corporate bonds and structured notes with the world of retail fixed-income investing.

In the world of retail investing, accessing high-quality data can be difficult. It’s often gated by hefty fees. In many parts of the world, it’s simply unavailable. If you’re a retail fixed-income investor, you know how crucial this information can be. It’s certainly challenging to make a profit when you can’t be sure of your portfolio’s exact value! Shibui is here to change the status quo.

Since 2004, Shibui Markets has helped fixed-income investors from around the world come together for high-quality data and vibrant discussion. Now, Shibui is re-launching under the management of SQX, and will benefit from our background in fixed-income data for institutions.

Powered by SQX’s high-quality data, Shibui Markets is equipped to provide detailed information on a universe of over 160,000 global corporate bonds and structured notes. The radical part? This data is entirely, completely free. The world of retail fixed-income investing is about to change forever.

A Wide Range of Open-Access Features

When a user visits Shibui, they’re able to access the site's entire database. This freely-available data includes daily pricing updates. Shibui's sophisticated pricing model calculates prices for every security based on the most recent market data, making sure that investors are armed with the freshest information every single day. Shibui records historical pricing data as well, allowing investors to track the prices of individual bonds over time.

For each security, every Shibui user can view daily clean and dirty prices, market yield, yield-to-maturity, yield-to-worst, price history, plus core reference data. And there's no limit to the number of securities you can view! While Shibui’s data never costs a cent, this same information can cost over 100$ elsewhere.

In-Depth Account-Access Features

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. With a free Shibui user account, you can take your investing to the next level with the suite of advanced features—including full reference data, detailed analytics, custom fantasy portfolios, discussion boards, and trade broadcasts. A Shibui account gives you access to insights on over 160,000 bonds and structured notes, and it won't cost you a penny.

Benefits of a Shibui Account

Let’s take a closer look at those benefits. While some bond data is available to all Shibui users, account holders can take their analysis to the next level with analytics such as Macauley duration and convexity. Other reference data includes details on coupon payments, calls, debt risk, and issuance. In addition to advanced reference data, dedicated investors can take their investment strategies for a test run with Shibui’s fantasy portfolios. Account holders are able to follow specific bonds and add them to their own custom portfolios to track their performance over time. These fantasy portfolios allow investors to try out their investment strategies in a completely risk-free space.

Perhaps best of all, creating a Shibui account gives investors access to a community of like-minded individuals. Shibui’s discussion forum allows users to swap trading strategies, compare notes, and rally behind successful investments. Shibui account holders can view the site’s trade broadcast, which highlights the investment activity of fellow logged-in account holders. Users will be able to view what’s working, what isn’t, and adjust their strategies accordingly.

A New Age of Investing

With free access to a massive universe of global corporate bonds and structured notes, Shibui offers retail investors the tools they need to excel. Whether you're a seasoned trader or just starting out, Shibui's user-friendly platform is designed to elevate your investing game. The revolution begins now.

Check out Shibui today at shibuimarkets.com !

SQX 2023 Year-in-Review

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:02:19 GMT

SQX 2023 Year-in-Review

Note from the CEO

2023 was a year of progress. As we look back over the past year, it’s incredible and humbling to count the ways SQX has grown.

We’ve dramatically expanded our Alternative Investments operations. We’ve introduced new products like Catastrophe Bonds and Intraday Treasuries, and enhanced our processes for existing products such as Municipal Bonds, Corporate Bonds, Structured Notes, and Cocos. We’ve added four new employees at our Aurora office. We’ve made all SQX products deliverable via API.

But even in the midst of change, many things about SQX have stayed the same. We’re just as passionate about providing accurate data on a wide range of securities. We’ve remained committed to responsive customer service and full information transparency. We’ve better codified our eagerness to serve clients and employees in our Mission, Vision, and Values statement.

The continued success of SQX directly results from the support and trust you place in us. Thank you for being a crucial part of our journey. We at SQX are excited about what the future holds, and we’re committed to delivering even greater value in the years to come.

—Timothy Tatum, CEO of Securities Quote Xchange

SQX Introduces New Products

U.S. Treasuries (Intraday)

In 2023, SQX began offering comprehensive intraday pricing for the entire spectrum of U.S. treasuries, including treasury bills, bonds, notes, and strips. We provide evaluated prices across all key maturities, from short-term 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, 6-, and 12-month T-bills, to long-term 2-, 3-, 5-, 7-, 10-, 20-, and 30-year T-notes and bonds.
With SQX treasury pricing, clients receive pricing updates delivered either end-of-day or intraday (every 15 minutes).
Fields provided include Pricing Date/Time, Bond Type, Coupon, Maturity Date, U.S. Code, Bid, Ask, Bid Yield, and Ask Yield.

Catastrophe Bonds

SQX is excited to offer both detailed pricing data and dynamic reference data for the full universe of catastrophe bonds.
Our cat bond file updates daily, providing clients with price changes and field updates as soon as we know about them.
Catastrophe bond fields provided include Date of Indication, Issue Size, Notional Outstanding, Current Principal Factor, Trigger Type, Bid Price, Ask Price, Bid Spread, Ask Spread, Bond, Sponsor, Mid Price, Mid Spread, U.S. Code, Expected Loss, Stated Coupon, and Risk.

SQX Improves Existing Products

Municipal Bonds

In 2023, SQX increased our muni bond coverage by roughly 15%. We’re proud to announce that we now cover virtually the entire universe of municipal bonds.
We’ve adjusted our muni pricing methodology hierarchy to increase output accuracy. Specifically, we’ve discovered that our evaluations based on historical quotes were so strong that we’ve increased inclusion of historical quotes in our pricing model. SQX customers can rely on the accuracy of our muni pricing model more than ever before.

Corporate Bonds

Our development team expanded our corporate bond coverage. We are excited to offer both pricing and reference data on a comprehensive universe of corporate bonds.
Additionally, SQX now officially offers detailed corporate bond curves. We provide curves for corporate bonds of all credit ratings ranging from AAA to CCC.

Structured Notes

In 2023, SQX radically increased our structured note coverage. Even at the beginning of 2023, SQX already had the broadest structured note coverage in the U.S. By the end of the year, we increased our coverage even further. We widened the coverage gap between us and our closest competitors, ensuring that SQX is the premier option for structured note pricing.

SQX Welcomes Four New Staff Members

Raymond Hanus, Marketing and Creative Manager (March 2023). Raymond is responsible for SQX’s marketing efforts, including writing blogs and maintaining the SQX LinkedIn page. His interests include writing about himself in newsletters.

Jayla Nicholas, Junior Developer (May 2023). Jayla assists the SQX team by maintaining SQX-related websites, designing, implementing, and enhancing bash scripts, as well as optimizing the SQX database. She’s easily the most fashionable SQX employee.

Max Colbert, Software Engineer (June 2023). Max helps SQX in several different areas, including solving software-based problems, developing our API file delivery, and creating hilarious whiteboard memes.

Sarah Engel, Sales and Business Analyst (September 2023). Sarah works as a sales representative for SQX, helping connect SQX with prospective clients, and maintaining relationships with prospects. She’s also our unofficial cookie provider.

Alternative Investments Product Growth

SQX has provided valuations for the universe of alternative investments—including REITS, DPPs, LPs, and Unregistered Securities (among others)—for over a decade.

However, in 2023, our alternative investments product grew in a whole new way. SQX has dramatically expanded our alts team, enabling us to provide per-share valuations on the full universe of alternative investments. We’ve established relationships with hundreds of issuers and sponsors who are now sending SQX regular pricing updates.

As part of our alternative investments coverage, SQX provides FINRA 2231(c) monitoring, including explanatory notes. We audit our clients’ security universe, flagging duplicate securities, noting name changes, and recording securities that have been closed. We give our alts clients a single consolidated file, which includes current prices for all their securities.

We’re proud of the incredible progress we’ve made in the world of alternative investments this year, and we’re looking forward to continued growth in 2024.

Added API for All Products

As of 2023, SQX officially offers the option to deliver all products through API! Whether our clients want muni bonds, alternative investments, structured notes, corporate bonds, U.S. treasuries, or catastrophe bonds, they may now choose to have their files delivered via API or SFTP. This addition increases SQX’s product accessibility, enabling us to serve a wider variety of clients.

Solidified SQX Vision, Mission, and Values

To make sure that SQX continues to move in a healthy direction, in 2023, we updated and expanded our vision, mission, and values statement. Both as individuals and as a company, this statement exists to keep us anchored to what we believe.

Vision:

To be the customer-friendly, value-oriented alternative to the big market data vendors.

Mission:

To provide responsive, high quality, cost-effective service to our clients.
To promote employees’ engagement with their families and communities by providing a flexible work environment.
To steward our financial and human resources to increase long-term profitability.

Values:

Mutual Support
Reliability
Integrity
Continuous Improvement
Humility
Responsible Stewardship

If you’re interested in hearing more, follow these links to read about our Vision , Mission , and Values .

2023 has been an incredible year, but we’re even more excited about what’s ahead for SQX in 2024! We’re eager to show you what’s up next—make sure you’re following us on LinkedIn to get all the SQX updates. Thank you for being a part of the SQX story!

Alternative Investments Pricing: The SQX Difference

raymondh@sqx.com (Raymond Hanus) — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:43:20 GMT

Alternative Investment Pricing: The SQX Difference

The Wild West of Financial Securities

REITs. DPPs. Liquidating Trusts. LPs. LLCs. Private Equities. Unregistered Securities. And so many more.

If you need data on alternative investments, you know that the alts world can be a jungle. Some securities are publicly issued, some aren’t (frequently, both types are held by the same sponsor). Plus, the securities themselves aren’t static. Name changes are common. Merges, liquidations, closures, conversions… There are many ways a security can change.

Keeping accurate records is a challenging job. It’s even more challenging when you factor in the high-stakes task of monitoring FINRA 2231(c) compliance. Maintaining current pricing data can be just as difficult. While most alternative investments provide fresh per-share valuations annually, many update quarterly or monthly. A few even update daily. SEC filings don’t always reflect the most recent price, and privately-issued securities simply aren’t available unless you reach out to issuers and sponsors individually. Maintaining fresh information is difficult and technical—and it’s easy to make mistakes.

A Challenging Task – A Simple Solution

If you’re a custodian, trying to maintain an accurate alternative investments file can be a nightmare. Most pricing teams hate the work necessary to maintain updated information. It’s time-consuming, tedious, exhausting, and always distracts from more important tasks.

SQX exists to offer a solution. We provide custodians with updated pricing and reference data for all their alts prices—even the most hard-to-price securities. We give our alts clients a single consolidated file, which includes current prices for all their securities. Oftentimes, this is exactly what custodians need.

Common Problems with Alts Files

A frequent situation that we encounter with our alternative investments clients is that their records have become disorganized. We’ve seen many different issues. Duplicate securities are common—usually caused by name changes. A security’s new name is added to the list, but the old name is never removed. When securities are renamed multiple times, it’s very difficult to keep everything straight. We’ve seen as many as seven instances of the same security in the same file.

We commonly see defunct securities—securities that have been closed, liquidated, merged, converted, or that are in default. Sometimes our clients’ files include securities that haven’t been active for over a decade. Severely outdated prices are another frequent problem, even for securities that are still active.

Every once in a while, we see worrisome securities, such as SEC-busted Ponzi schemes. Occasionally, clients’ alts files include incorrect FINRA 2231(c) compliance info. The stakes are high—incorrect compliance information can be costly.

An Alternative Approach

If you’re a custodian who prices alternative investments in-house, SQX is here to be a resource for you. Whether your alts file is just a little dusty or in complete disarray, we’re the perfect company to get your records in tip-top shape. We’ll give you everything you need to help your alts process run smoother than ever before.

We provide all your alts prices in a single file, delivered via SFTP or API. Whether you need updates daily, weekly, or end-of-month, we’ll deliver you an updated file on your terms. SQX is able to cover the full universe of alternative investments—including privately-issued securities. What’s more, because SQX receives prices directly from issuers and sponsors, we’re usually able to offer fresh prices as soon as the updated valuation becomes available—sometimes up to three months before they’re filed with the SEC!

When you’ve partnered with SQX, you can always be confident about the alts information you receive. We carefully document the price source, the pricing date, the statement date, the date we obtained the price, and the pricing frequency. If you need more information, you don’t need to worry. SQX is completely transparent, and we’re always willing to share our meticulous audit trail.

One of the most useful services we provide to alternative investments custodians is issuer-quoted information related to FINRA 2231(c). For each relevant security, SQX shares issuer-provided information related to FINRA 2231(c), including Publicly-Issued Non-Traded REIT or DPP? (Y/N) and whether the security is (i) based on valuations of the assets and liabilities of the DPP or REIT performed at least annually, by, or with the material assistance or confirmation of, a third-party valuation expert or service; and (ii) derived from a methodology that conforms to standard industry practice. To avoid any confusion, we also provide explanatory notes and keep a detailed audit trail. If there’s a noteworthy situation—like if a security is subject to the 1940 Act, or an issuer shares a special circumstance—you’ll be able to read all the details for yourself.

The SQX Difference

Perhaps best of all, working with SQX means working with a friendly, responsive company that always puts your needs first. If you have a question for us at any point in the process, we’ll answer it within a single business day. We know that your business relies on timely, accurate information, and we’ll make sure that you get what you need to serve your own clients. Our first priority is always serving you.

If you’re an alternative investments custodian, you know how hard it can be to maintain accurate, updated information. Alts pricing is a chore, but we’d love to take it off your hands. With over 20 years of expertise and a team of efficient, dedicated employees, SQX is equipped to revolutionize the way you price alternative investments. When your team’s resources are freed up to pursue more important tasks, you’ll be able to prioritize growth like never before. And it all starts with SQX.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

SQX Solves Common Issues with Market Data Vendors

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 21:06:02 GMT

How does SQX Solve Common Problems with Market Data Vendors?

Does a Helpful Data Vendor Exist?

If you need high-quality market data, you know from experience how unpleasant it can be to find. It’s expensive. It’s specialized. It’s inconvenient. Unfortunately, most market data vendors are part of the problem. Between endless red tape, skyrocketing expenses, restrictive options, and interminable delays, you could be forgiven for despairing of ever finding a helpful data vendor.

But don’t lose hope. Not all market data vendors are created equal. At SQX, we’re not like the rest. Our priority is you, and we’ll make sure you find a way to get what you need—with a lot less hassle, time, and money. But how does SQX compare to other data providers? Let’s talk specifics.

High Value, Low Cost

When it comes to subscriptions costs, the difference is elementary. Other market data vendors have high prices. SQX has low prices. If other data providers were offering a better product, charging a lot more might be understandable. But here’s the problem: they aren’t. In every scenario, SQX data coverage is at least as good (and sometimes better) than the coverage of other providers.

SQX offers a product that is the same or better at a fraction of the cost you’ll be charged by other market data vendors. Equal quality for a significantly lower price? That’s a pretty good deal.

Client-Centered Customization Options

A major issue with market data providers is their often-limited customization options. Many data vendors seem to think you’re working for them, not the other way around. They’ll expect you to accept whatever file format they see fit to give you. They’ll force you to bend over backwards to integrate their data into your system, giving you another annoying task to accomplish.

SQX is different. Unlike many financial data providers, we deliver our data in whatever file format works best for you—tailoring our files to fit your needs. SQX clients receive data delivery via SFTP or API—whichever you’d prefer. Instead of wasting your IT department’s time with backend configurations, you’ll be able to focus your resources on achieving your core mission. With SQX, you’ll save time, energy, and effort. Why? Because at SQX, we remember that we’re the ones working for you.

Crystal-Clear Transparency

When it comes to birthday or Christmas presents, it can be fun to get something mysterious. When it comes to financial data, not knowing what you’re getting is deeply unsettling. When you get your data from the big market data vendors, you’re handed a number, but you can’t find out how that number was created—you have to blindly trust that it’s the right price.

That’s not how we do things at SQX. Christmas presents from us have clear wrapping paper. We’re committed to complete transparency, meaning you know exactly how the price you receive is created. We’ll provide you with the full rationale behind our prices, including the data it’s based on. If we used a peer bond, we’ll tell you. If we used a bid or offer, we’ll explain it.

This sort of information is perfect for audits. If a price challenge comes your way, you don’t need to lose sleep—you can rest easy knowing that SQX keeps an extensive audit trail. When you partner with SQX, you’ll always be in the know.

Responsive Technical Support

If you are experiencing a technical issue, and you reach out to other financial data providers, what can you expect? The answer is invariably the same: slow service, impersonal responses, and long delays. You can count on being treated like a number on a screen, not like an actual human being. The big data vendors just don’t have the capacity to address your needs in a timely way.

The most dramatic way that SQX differs from other financial data vendors is also the simplest. We’re actually friendly. It doesn’t matter what the problem is—we’re always welcoming and easy to reach. What’s more, if you reach out to SQX, you will always hear back from us within a business day—no matter what. We’ll treat you like you actually matter—because you do.

Choosing the Right Vendor

When it comes to fulfilling data needs, choosing the right vendor is incredibly important. While many providers may seem similar on the surface, small differences can mean the difference between a satisfying partnership and a tension-filled one. For a market data vendor that offers transparent, top-quality data at the best prices—while also respecting you and prioritizing your needs—consider partnering with SQX. That’s a decision you won’t regret.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

What are SQX's Values?

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 20:15:30 GMT

What are SQX's Values?

A Values-Driven Data Vendor

What you value will determine who you become. This is just as true for businesses as it is for people. That’s why we at SQX are committed to holding fast to a defined list of healthy values.

If a vision is the “What” and a mission is the “How,” our values are the “Why.” Why do we do what we do? What gets us out of bed every morning? SQX employees are selected because we share these same principles. As we go about our daily work, these six characteristics are the qualities that keep us anchored:

Mutual Support

At SQX, we’re committed to each other. We have a team mentality—we succeed together by helping one another. When one of us needs help, we ask for it! And we don’t look down on anyone who’s struggling. This also applies to our clients. When you have a question for us, we’ll listen. We respect you. We’re committed to helping you. You are our priority.

Reliability

SQX is a company that can be counted on. Of course, we’ve all seen companies break their promises as soon as they become inconvenient. We want to do better. At SQX, we care so much about being reliable that we’re making this principal central to our identity.

When we make an agreement, we’ll stick with it. When we begin a project, we’ll work on it until it’s done. If a task becomes too big for one person, we count on each other to lend a hand. If we get coverage requests or price challenges, we’ll go all out to make sure they’re answered. We pursue these inquiries for as long as it takes to find the correct information. As long as it’s possible, we’ll find a way to make it happen. Just ask our clients—if we make a commitment, we keep it.

Integrity

We want our customers to trust us. Of course, this can’t happen unless SQX is worthy of your trust. Therefore, we’ve committed to living out what we believe—as a company and as individuals. If we’ve been given a task, we’ll fulfil it. If we say we’ll do something, we’ll do it.

As much as we try to prevent them, mistakes sometimes happen. If we make a mistake, we’ll admit our mistake, explain what went wrong, then solve it. We’re committed to integrity—even when it hurts.

Continuous Improvement

SQX is dedicated to excellence. Of course, we think we’re already pretty good at what we do. But we’re never so effective that we can’t be doing better. We never want to be so self-confident that we’re blind to ways we can improve. We always have something to learn, and we won’t rest until we’re serving you as well as we possibly can.

As of today, we’re better than we’ve ever been. The process of tracking down data has never been smoother. We’ve increased our staff. We’ve expanded our product range. We’ve migrated our servers to the cloud, ensuring that our services are as reliable and available as possible. We’re integrating new technologies into our processes and system development, including A.I. The arrow of change at SQX is pointed upwards, but we’ll always look for new ways we can grow.

Humility

At SQX, we’ll treat you like an equal. We’ll make time for you, and make you feel important. We know you’re a human being, just like us. You matter.

For instance, sometimes we don’t understand how our clients or brokers operate—we’re more used to our own system! But we don’t automatically think our way is best. Instead, we keep an open mind and try to be as accommodating as possible. If we’re wrong, we’ll acknowledge it. If someone corrects us, we won’t get upset, we’ll get on it! Our goal is to serve you, not to be right.

Responsible Stewardship

Gifts. Trust. Responsibilities. Resources. We recognize that we’ve been given a lot. Every time someone relies on SQX, they give us a torch to hold. We want to carry it well. Our aim is to ensure that we honor each other, our clients, and our leadership by taking care of the things they’ve entrusted to us. Stewardship, not selfishness. Responsibility, not carelessness.

A Commitment to You

Of course, none of these six values can exist in a vacuum. That’s why we need them all. Without one, the rest are hollow.

SQX is committed to being the best company we can be. For us, success isn’t measured by dollars, but by how well we’re serving you. The world of financial securities is in desperate need of a company with honor, with backbone, with compassion. SQX aims to be this company.

This is our commitment. Hold us to it.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

What is SQX's Mission?

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 19:42:16 GMT

What is SQX's Mission?

The Road to Success

At SQX, we aren’t confused about what we want. We don’t lie awake at night wondering why we provide our clients with high-quality financial data. Our vision is clear: to be the customer-friendly, value-oriented alternative to the big market data vendors.

So what about our mission? We know where we’re going, but how do we get there? If a vision is the destination, the mission is the roadmap. It’s the step-by-step instructions, what we do on a daily basis.

Our Mission: Service

The first part of our mission is to provide responsive, high quality, cost-effective service to our clients. In a way, this is a given. We’ve always given our clients top-tier data on a wide variety of securities: alternative investments, muni bonds, structured notes, broker-quoted—you name it!

But now, we’re making it clear that this sort of service isn’t an accident. It’s at the center of our identity. Our financial data coverage is world-class. Our prices are competitive. Our clients can expect the best service in the business—and we’re getting better every day. If we receive an email, we’ll respond to it the same day—usually within an hour. In the rare case where we can’t immediately address your concern, we’ll let you know what’s going on! We’ll never leave you hanging for days or weeks on end. Our mission won’t be accomplished until you’re content.

Kindness: By Example

Secondly, SQX has a mission to promote employees’ engagement with their families and communities by providing a flexible work environment.

But wait, why are we sharing this with you? Of course it’s great that we support our employees, but isn’t this part of our mission only relevant to our internal workings? On the contrary—flourishing employees and a healthy work environment directly benefit our clients.

The more equipped, supported, and encouraged we are at SQX, the more we’re able to have energy, passion, and drive to serve you. It’s a lot easier to provide friendly customer service when employees enjoy their time at work. It’s easier to value others when you feel valued yourself. For instance, one of our employees regularly coaches his son’s soccer games. When he needs to work in the evening instead of the afternoon one day a week, we accommodate and support him. Many of us have kids too—we get it! Since our workplace treats us like real people with real lives, we’ll treat you the exact same way.

Let's Succeed Together

Finally, part of our mission is to steward our financial and human resources to increase long-term profitability. At SQX, we believe that the resources we have are not meant to be used carelessly or selfishly, but to be stewarded for the benefit of others. As SQX increases in profitability, you’ll benefit too.

In the past few years, the success we’ve achieved has allowed us to expand the SQX team. These new employees are now streamlining and speeding up the data entry process, helping clients interact with our database, and making our website more accessible. None of this is possible without the success we’ve achieved. As we succeed, we’ll be even more equipped to help you succeed.

At SQX, we have a mission to serve you. We won’t settle for anything less than our best. These aren’t empty words for us. Just ask our clients—if we say something, we do it. We love showing them that working with a financial data provider can be an amazing experience.

We’d love the chance to show you too.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

What is SQX's Vision?

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 18:57:51 GMT

What is SQX's Vision?

Editor's Note: We at SQX have updated our vision statement since this article was published. Click here to read more about it .

The SQX Difference

At SQX, we strive to be different than other financial data vendors. Any of our clients can tell you that working with SQX is a positive experience. Our aim is to be friendly, transparent, and less expensive. But how are we able to do this? Why is SQX different from the other players in the business?

The difference comes down to what drives us. Each SQX employee—from the CEO down—is passionate about making sure that we’re doing the right things for the right reasons. We don’t only care about doing our job “well;” we also care about treating our clients “right.”

A Vision to Serve

That’s why our vision is to be the customer-friendly, value-oriented alternative to the big market data vendors.

A vision statement is a company’s dream. It’s the destination, the goal, “where we see ourselves in ten years.” At SQX, we dream about providing people with a better alternative for market data prices. It’s an open secret that big companies struggle with providing excellent client service and pricing transparency. They can also be difficult to deal with—it often takes several weeks for them to help you. SQX exists to provide an alternative.

A Values-Driven Data Vendor

At SQX, we're committed to a defined list of values. Our goal is to treat our customers with respect and dignity. If our clients have a question, we’ll respond within a day—usually within an hour. We keep a meticulous audit trail to guard against any potential price challenges. We’re transparent with our information—we’ll always tell you the age and source of the data you receive, so you can make wise judgements.

SQX is different from the rest—and we’re proud of it! We’ve set our sights on being the go-to alternative in the world of financial securities. We won’t rest until we’ve reached that position. If you want to find a financial data company with a passion to serve you, look no further than SQX.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

Who Are SQX's Customers?

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 21:12:47 GMT

Who Are SQX's Customers?

A Diverse Financial World

SQX provides financial data to a wide variety of customers. The financial world is quite broad, and SQX’s customer base illustrates the field’s great diversity. Fortunately, SQX is able to provide prices and data to meet many different needs. SQX customers tend to fall into four main groups: hedge funds, regulators, money managers, and brokers/dealers.

Hedge Funds

Hedge funds use SQX data to gain a competitive edge. It is essential for hedge funds to have up-to-date and accurate information. Indeed, those who are acting upon the most recent information have a significant advantage over hedge funds who are working with even slightly outdated information. Therefore, as hedge funds use our data for price discovery, they arrive at the relative value trades that will put them in the best possible position.

Regulators

Regulators need SQX data to ensure that the decisions they make are accurate. As regulators seek to keep the market running smoothly, their judgements must remain error-free. To prevent costly mistakes, it is essential for regulators to be operating with accurate pricing information. The duties of checking adherence to disclosure and ensuring market stability require the sort of current, accurate data that SQX can provide.

Money Managers

Money managers benefit from SQX’s information as they discern the best way to invest their assets. Every day, money managers need updated priced securities for day-to-day transactions, as well as end-of-day valuations of portfolios. SQX can provide this updated data, guaranteeing that money managers are able to act from the most informed position, gaining an informational advantage over the competition.

Brokers and Dealers

Brokers and dealers generally need prices for two main reasons. The first is so that they can establish rates on new issues of bonds. When new bond issues are released, brokers and dealers need to know how to price the new issues to potential buyers. Secondly, brokers and dealers frequently require data about trading indications for secondary market trading. At SQX, we produce reliable evaluated prices for a comprehensive universe of global corporate bonds as well as US municipal bonds every day. SQX provides accurate and up-to-date financial data on even the hardest bonds to price.

Which of these four groups might you fall into? Whichever category best describes you, we are confident that SQX can help you meet your financial data needs.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

What Does “Transparency” Mean for SQX?

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 21:00:40 GMT

What Does "Transparency" Mean for SQX?

Meaningful Transparency

One of the most distinguishing features of SQX is our guarantee of meaningful transparency. But sometimes terms can be confusing—what does “transparency” even mean? For SQX, being transparent means ensuring that our customers know about the sources of the information they are paying for. We disclose every single factor that provides input into our pricing data, whether for municipal bonds, alternative assets, broker-quoted securities, or corporate bonds.

Municipal Bond Pricing Transparency

Let’s talk specifics. When it comes to municipal bonds, we will disclose our entire pricing waterfall and inform customers which tier their information comes from. The most reliable indicator of current price is the direct pricing data we receive from MSRB and MBIS participants. This information lets us know if there has been any movement of the bond in the past 30 days. We consider both recent trades and recent bids and offers as we calculate the estimated current price of the bond, and we will always tell our customers which one we use.

When no direct pricing data is available, we generally provide evaluated prices by either using a historical quote of the municipal bond, or finding a “peer bond” that is similar to the desired bond in terms of duration, status, and issuer. When there is no available market data and no appropriate peer, we take the current credit rating and sector to find the most accurate yield curve (gleaned from MBIS data) for the bond. At every step of the process, our customers will know exactly what information they are receiving from us, and they will know what process SQX used to arrive at the evaluation. We will be completely transparent at every stage.

Alternative Asset Pricing Transparency

If you’ve come to SQX to find pricing on alternative assets, we are equally transparent, disclosing the information that you’ll need to be fully informed. For instance, we will give our customers the source of the information we use. If we found the info in a document, we’ll share it with you. If we found it on a webpage, we’ll pass along the link. Even if we received the information from an email, we’ll share our records of the email and the date of information. Regardless of the source, SQX always keeps a meticulous audit trail to guard against any potential price challenges.

Additionally, SQX will disclose the dates associated with the information we receive. This means that we share not only the source’s date, but the date we found the source. We will never disguise an old price as a new one, and we will always tell our customers everything that we know about the age of their data. Partners of SQX can be confident that they will be set up with the most information possible.

Broker-Quoted Securities Pricing Transparency

For broker-quoted securities, SQX continues to be fully transparent. No matter the security, we will disclose the details of the source. We will tell you the details of the broker’s relationship to the issuer, whether underwriter, agent, or otherwise. We also keep a robust audit trail for broker-quoted securities, holding on to records of who sent us information, what company that person is from, what information they sent, and what day they sent it on. Needless to say, we make sure that our clients are fully aware of what’s going on.

We are especially careful to ensure that customers know the date of our source’s information. At SQX, we never try to pass off an old price as a new one. If there is no price available for a given date, and we have to use older information, we will not put a new date on an old price. At SQX, we do not play games behind our customer’s backs. On the contrary—if a price is old, we’ll say so! If you’ve partnered with SQX, you always can trust us to be fully transparent about the quality of the information we provide.

Corporate Bond Pricing Transparency

SQX also demonstrates meaningful transparency for corporate bonds. Though our corporate bond pricing algorithm is proprietary, we publish an in-depth white paper on our methodology, so customers can see how we arrive at the final price. As our white paper explains, “We probably have the most robust and accurate methodology for pricing derivatives and callable bonds. In order to price callable bonds when the bond price is close to the call price, a very extensive analysis of the value of the call needs to be performed; matrix pricing can have a significant pricing error for callable securities.” We never leave our customers in the dark, but help them make informed decisions.

Accessible Support Team

No matter what type of data you seek to find from SQX, you can count on receiving stellar customer service. Everyone knows the struggle of reaching out to a corporation for help, and having to wade through miles of red tape, enduring delay after delay. Not at SQX. No matter what, we guarantee you’ll hear back from us within one business day. We are always approachable, friendly, and easy to reach—regardless of what you want to discuss. How’s that for a breath of fresh air?

When you come to SQX, you can be confident that you will always be fully informed about the details and quality of the information you receive. That’s the kind of transparency you can count on.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

SEC: Crypto Exposure Surveillance May No Longer Be Optional

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 18:17:29 GMT

SEC: Crypto Exposure Surveillance May No Longer Be Optional for Hedge Funds

Segments of LinkedIn lit up on Wednesday, August 10 ^th with comments about the SEC’s proposed revisions to Form PF, revisions which would require private hedge funds to disclose their assets’ exposure to the crypto market. SEC chair Gary Gensler argued that the revisions would enable regulators to “gain transparency into an important sector of the financial marketplace to better assess risk to the overall system.”

Among other changes, the proposed rules would require companies to separate crypto exposure and crypto assets from cash and cash equivalents on their balance sheets.

Too Burdensome?

But quantifying the value of crypto exposure is no easy feat. Hedge funds may not only own digital assets themselves but have indirect exposure through shares in companies with digital assets and through the holdings of instruments such as ETFs, UITs, and mutual funds. SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda, an opponent of the change, pointed out in a statement that the costs of these “more granular disclosures” would disproportionately burden smaller private funds that are less able to allocate additional resources to compliance.

The Solution

Fortunately, SQX is ready with a solution for both large and small private advisers. SQX began offering crypto exposure surveillance earlier this year, and we have already cleared the hurdles to tracking exposure to the turbulent and miasmic crypto market. And we level the playing field through pricing tailored to the size and need of the financial institution so that smaller firms aren’t unduly burdened.

We track exposure for a range of instruments such as ETF's, ETP's, UIT's, Mutual Funds, Equities, Indices, and Derivatives. For each instrument, we report the type of crypto exposure, such as blockchain, mining, hardware, etc. For securities, we show the ratio of digital assets to total holdings, plus we calculate a qualitative weighting of the security’s exposure and indicate the correlations between the price of the security and the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

This robust crypto exposure surveillance has benefits beyond compliance, though. Clients have expressed interest in our data to develop internal risk management controls and exposure monitoring, create and sell ETFs with customized exposure types, recommend products or funds based on clients’ risk tolerances, and make trading decisions to gain exposure to or hedge against crypto.

Whichever group you fall into—whether it’s SEC compliance, product development, or strategic trading—SQX can make the task of tracking your crypto exposure easy and affordable.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

The Importance of Crypto Exposure Surveillance | Crypto Crash Exposes the Vulnerability of Institutional Assets

Tue, 17 May 2022 22:40:19 GMT

Crypto Crash Exposes the Vulnerability of Institutional Assets: The Importance of Crypto Exposure Surveillance

Last week’s crypto crash sent tremors through the broader market due to the increasing exposure that institutional investors have to crypto volatility. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called last week for increased regulation of cryptocurrencies, stating in a Senate hearing Tuesday that “digital assets may present risks to the financial system” and that stablecoins in particular are a “rapidly growing product” that present “rapidly growing risks.”

The problem is, regulation will likely legitimate and accelerate crypto’s integration into the broader market, and thus actually increase some forms of risk exposure. It’s hard to imagine that regulation will do much to moderate the volatility that’s always been endemic to the crypto market, especially unbacked currencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum.

In short, crypto may continue to carry substantial risk, a risk that would be increasingly felt by traditional financial institutions as they respond to the public’s desire for crypto and other digital assets.

But the devil here will be in the details. How will the holdings of a mutual fund or a trust be affected if more and more companies, like Microstrategy, start holding large portions of their cash in bitcoin? How will volatile changes in corporate assets or sovereign debt impact the value of derivatives on fixed-income instruments? These details will likely proliferate, and it will become more and more difficult for asset managers and compliance officers to have any accurate idea of their risk exposure.

SQX’s crypto exposure surveillance tracks the full range of global securities and derivatives exposed to the cryptocurrency ecosystem. For ETFs we also show the ratio of digital assets to total holdings, plus we calculate a qualitative weighting of the security’s exposure and indicate the correlations between the price of the security and the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Data like this may not solve the problem of increasing crypto exposure, but it can help compliance officers, regulators, exchanges, hedge funds, institutional investors, and custodians more accurately analyze their risk and take the necessary steps to protect the value of their entrusted assets.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

SQX Launches Crypto Exposure Surveillance Service

adamh@sqx.com (Adam Hammond) — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 09:11:35 GMT

SQX Launches Crypto Exposure Data Service

Worldwide Crypto Exposure

Chicago, March 17, 2022 - Securities Quote Xchange (SQX) has launched an industry-leading database linking securities worldwide with their crypto holdings. This database covers exchange-traded products, mutual funds, and listed equities that hold crypto assets. Features include crypto exposure surveillance, crypto holdings, and crypto price correlation.

Despite regulatory uncertainty the financial markets have embraced crypto assets. Increasingly listed instruments and collective investment have invested in crypto assets. Because of their extreme volatility investors need to know to what extent they are exposed to crypto assets so that they can manage their risks.

Tim Tatum, SQX CEO says “This database will be valuable to compliance officers, investors, clearing firms, custodians, and exchanges. As we can see from recent events, cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile, and investors should be monitoring the risk as they invest in instruments with underlying assets exposed to cryptocurrencies.”

The Crypto Exposure Data service covers all global regions, including, Australia, Asia, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Available via SFTP and API. Updated daily

For more information, please visit sqx.com/crypto-exposure-data or get in touch with our team via inquiries@sqx.com .

About Securities Quote Xchange

Securities Quote Xchange ("SQX"), a Chicago-based company, specializes in covering hard-to-price securities, including broker-quoted notes, municipal and corporate bonds as well as the exposure of listed instruments to crypto assets.

Note to Editors:

Tim Tatum CEO of SQX is available for interviews: timt@sqx.com

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

EDI Partnership: Broker-Quoted, Structured Note Pricing

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 10:51:53 GMT

EDI Partnership: Broker-Quoted, Structured-Note Pricing

In this video, Jonathan Bloch, chief executive officer of EDI and Tim Tatum, chief executive of SQX talks about the recent joint venture to provide broker-quoted, structured-note pricing. The discussion covers market demand for structured-notes in light of IDC discontinuing their product, SQX’s value proposition and their flexibility to customize the product based on individual specifications.

Find out more about our structured note pricing here or visit EDI’s website .

Exchange Data International (EDI) helps the global financial and investment community make informed decisions through the provision of fast, accurate, timely, and affordable data reference services. EDI’s extensive content database includes worldwide equity and fixed income corporate actions, dividends, static reference data, closing prices and shares outstanding, delivered via data feeds and the internet. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, EDI has staff in Canada, India, Morocco, South Africa, and the United States.

Want more SQX updates? Follow SQX on LinkedIn and subscribe to our
LinkedIn newsletter to stay ahead of the curve.

New Structured Note Pricing Partner EDI

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 10:36:34 GMT

New Structured-Note Pricing Partner EDI

Chicago, London, 14th July 2020: SQX, developer of the first broker-quote aggregation service for the US bond market, today announced a partnership with Exchange Data International (EDI) to distribute broker-quoted, structured-note pricing.

Through this collaboration, EDI can now distribute structured-note pricing that is competitive to the established providers.

Tim Tatum, CEO of SQX says:

“In light of the need for structured-note pricing coming this fall, SQX offers a comprehensive, custom-made solution to cover more than 45k structured-note securities.”

SQX specializes in data aggregation services, allowing clients to receive a single, consolidated file rather than chasing prices from individual broker-dealers.

Jonathan Bloch, Chief Executive Officer of EDI says:

“Fixed income markets are becoming more dependent on data to function optimally. Through our partnership with SQX we will be able to cover daily pricing of structured notes. These data sets are either not available or accessible through more expensive offerings. EDI is happy to give our clients new structured note solutions and better options.”

The service is available through FIX API or intraday via secure SFTP files.

For more information about SQX, please visit our product page at www.sqx.com or contact inquiries@sqx.com .

For more information about EDI, please visit our product page at www.exchange-data.com or contact info@exchange-data.com

About SQX

Securities Quote Xchange (SQX) is a leading provider of fixed-income securities data analytics and pricing, specializing in pricing and analytics for municipal bonds, corporate bonds, and broker-quoted securities. To learn more, please visit www.sqx.com .

About Exchange Data International

Exchange Data International (EDI) helps the global financial and investment community make informed decisions through the provision of fast, accurate, timely, and affordable data reference services. EDI’s extensive content database includes worldwide equity and fixed income corporate actions, dividends, static reference data, closing prices and shares outstanding, delivered via data feeds and the internet. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, EDI has staff in Canada, India, Morocco, South Africa and the United States. To learn more, please visit www.exchange-data.com .