Bloomberg extends IBVAL front-office pricing to cover Europe

Backed by contextual metadata, the expanded solution delivers pricing across the liquidity spectrum covering USD, EUR and GBP credit markets.

Bloomberg’s Intraday BVAL (IBVAL) front-office pricing solution now covers all EUR and GBP investment grade and high yield credit bonds included in Bloomberg’s flagship Europe and UK credit indices.

The move becomes the latest expansion of IBVAL, which launched last year pricing USD credit securities.

The firm has also released new contextual features, giving traders insight into IBVAL’s pricing.

“As credit markets transition to more electronic trading, there’s increasing demand for rapid pricing insights, especially for less liquid securities, to actively manage client portfolios, develop credit algos, execute portfolio trades, and to inform trading decisions more broadly,” said Eric Isenberg, global head of enterprise data pricing at Bloomberg.

“The introduction of IBVAL pricing in Europe backed by contextual metadata provides a new defensible price discovery channel for the world’s largest credit markets.”

Read more: Fireside Friday with… Bloomberg’s Ravi Sawhney

IBVAL uses a machine learning model that consumes market data points from a range of data sources to deliver real-time pricing across the liquidity spectrum.

Users receiving IBVAL through B-PIPE, Bloomberg’s real-time market data feed, will also be able to view the associated scores from Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing service, BVAL.

This BVAL score ranges from 1 to 10 and provides insight on the relative amount and consistency of market data used to calculate the IBVAL price for a given security based on the most recent BVAL snapshot. Lower scores imply that there was less comparable market data available to derive the IBVAL price.

According to Bloomberg, this can be a useful data point to help inform trading decisions when there’s limited information available about a given security.

Other new features include I-spread and G-spread metrics which publish alongside IBVAL pricing, allowing traders to understand the relative value analytics of the underlying bond prices.

The scores and relative value metrics are available for IBVAL’s global pricing providing traders, providing further insight into what drives IBVAL pricing.

«