Cusip Preps Launch of Issuance Data Reports and Hedge Fund Offering

Cusip Global Services (CGS), part of McGraw Hill Financial, is gearing up for the release of two new product offerings, Cusip issuance reports and a separate file with Cusip hedge fund identifiers.

The Cusip issuance trends product, a new standalone service due to be released in the first quarter of 2011, will include 20 years of Cusip issuance reports data updated monthly and split into three segments—corporate issuance, municipals, and US government.

The product is currently being tested internally and with clients.

New York-based Maria Latorraca, director, products, CGS, says the target audience for this product will be professionals who analyze historical economic data. The idea is that the Cusip issuance data can be compared to other market indicators to predict future trends.

Meanwhile, Cusip Global Services is also preparing the release of a new hedge fund product after increasing the number of Cusip identifiers for hedge funds and funds of funds.

In 2009, CGS partnered with hedge fund information provider HedgeFund.Net to improve Cusip coverage of this market, and the vendor has now generated more than 11,000 Cusips for hedge funds, mainly in the US and offshore locations.

“We have more than 11,000 that we’ve identified, but we still have more research to do before we actually release the service,” says Latorraca, who expects the new segmented hedge fund file to be released by the end of March.

In the meantime, the new identifiers are not available to users. CGS has historically assigned Cusip identifiers to hedge funds on a request basis, classifying them as funds. With the implementation of its new Cusip assignment platform, CGS can now classify the funds as hedge funds, and domestic and global hedge funds will be offered in the new service.

New York-based Matthew Bastian, director, market and business development, CGS, says the new hedge fund offering will be a “boutique” product, carving out identifiers of interest to the hedge fund industry. “We foresee fund administrators and portfolio managers—people who work in this space—to be interested in the new product,” he says.

In recent years, CGS has focused on increasing the number of asset classes covered by Cusip identifiers, and hedge fund identifiers is one example of this. The company has also expanded the options coverage, teaming up with futures and options reference data provider FOW Tradedata.

The work with FOW has enabled CGS to generate Cusips for US options. Bastian says there have now also been requests for CGS to cover Canadian equity options. This is an area CGS plans to look at in the third and second quarter of 2011, but there is a need for a source similar to FOW to assign en masse. “We need a source for Canadian equity options, and when we have that we can start assigning them,” he says.