Since the collapse of the auction rate securities market in the US in 2008, holders of these now illiquid instruments have struggled to find reliable secondary market quotes and price clarity. Now, with best-of-breed evaluated pricing from Pluris Valuation Advisors LLC, SIX Financial Information’s clients can value their auction rate securities with confidence.
While SIX Financial Information has offered evaluated pricing for a wide range of OTC derivative, fixed income, and illiquid instruments for many years, auction rate securities (ARS) have proved to be a particularly difficult class of assets to value. With Pluris’ extensive database covering thousands of recent transactions and its relationship with SecondMarket, which is currently the only active auction rate trading venue, Pluris is able to provide an additional element of certainty in their evaluated prices far beyond what other providers can deliver.
“Many factors should be considered in any evaluation, but recent transactions of similar assets are especially relevant,” said Bob Sangha, Senior Product Manager, Evaluated Pricing at SIX Financial Information. “Because Pluris is focused on the ARS market, they have a broad database of recent sales and quotes available for use in their evaluations. This critical element gives a great deal of credibility to their results, and we are pleased to be able to offer this dependable and established service to our customers.”
The Pluris auction rate pricing available through SIX covers municipal, student loan and preferreds. It is integrated with SIX Financial Information’s own proprietary evaluations for fixed income, interest rates, FX, credit, equity and commodity instruments, which includes valuations from other leading third parties. Rounding out the service is SIX Financial Information’s wealth of security master data for the ARS universe as well as millions of other globally traded equity, fixed income and derivative instruments.
“Our focus is primarily on collecting the most robust input data for our models and providing the highest quality, most accurate valuations possible for auction rate securities,” said Espen Robak CFA, President of Pluris. “So to be able to distribute our service alongside SIX Financial Information’s own best in class evaluated pricing through their extensive, global network of offices is a tremendous advantage. We especially look forward to working with SIX as their values of service and quality are closely aligned with our own.”
