This Week: CME, Katana/IHS Markit, S&P, SmartStream, Causality Link & More

CME Rolls Out FX Options Volatility Tool

CME Group has unveiled a new FX options volatility converter tool that prices the exchange’s listed FX option liquidity in OTC terms, to make it easier for FX traders to monitor price relationships, make more informed decisions, and ensure best execution. The new tool takes price data from CME’s FX options central limit order book, which shares common elements with OTC options—such as style, expiration time, and underlying price convergence—and creates a volatility grid by tenor, deltas, and quote comparisons in OTC-standard formats to enable price comparison across options pairs, making it easier for traders to make decisions across listed and OTC markets..

Katana Skewers IHS Markit Bond Pricing

London-based bond analytics provider Katana has expanded its fixed income coverage with the addition of 30,000 US, European, and emerging markets bonds from IHS Markit, complementing Katana’s existing European government and agency bonds. Katana uses big data technology and machine-learning algorithms to analyze up to 10 years of data from IHS Markit to detect reverting dislocations and reveal relative value insights for up to 200 million bond pairs over six bond universes. Investors, portfolio managers, and traders can optimize their holdings and achieve alpha, and monitor their holdings or watchlists to identify opportunities and spot market trends faster and more accurately.

Lightspeed Sells Lime Assets to Score Priority Corp

Lightspeed Financial Services has agreed to sell its high-frequency trading assets (formerly Lime Brokerage) to Score Priority Corp, a New York-based agency broker serving institutional, professional, and retail clients. The deal, which is expected to close on October 30, will see Score acquire Lightspeed’s low-latency execution technologies, and the Lime client base, employees, and brand. Lightspeed will continue to focus on serving professional traders without any conflict of high-frequency business, while Score will absorb the Lime assets into its existing operations.

Capitolis Gets Buy-in from Citi, JP Morgan, State Street

Capitolis, a provider of software-as-a-service for balance sheet optimization, plans to accelerate its technology and product development, and to expand sales and marketing activities, following an undisclosed investment from Citigroup, JP Morgan, and State Street. The Capitolis platform helps firms free up capital and remove barriers that would restrict trading, by eliminating unnecessary positions and identifying the most suitable party to hold those remaining. So far, Capitolis has eliminated $5 trillion in positions for more than 50 banks, hedge funds, and asset managers, officials say.

Causality Link to Add MT Newswires to Research Assistant

AI-driven research platform provider Causality Link is to incorporate financial news from MT Newswires’ Live Briefs Pro–Global Markets offering into its Research Assistant platform. Live Briefs Pro–Global Markets provides Causality Link with more than 130 categories of original, ticker-tagged, and meta-coded content to augment Research Assistant’s signals and financial models. Research Assistant extracts data from millions of documents and text sources, then aggregates cause-and-effect relationships between market indicators and company key performance indicators to deliver more accurate and longer-lasting insights and forecasts. Causality Link plans to go live with MT Newswires’ content this Fall, including real-time updates and historical content.

Solactive, Truvalue Ally for AI ESG Indexes

German index ESG index provider Solactive has launched the Solactive Truvalue ESG Index Series, developed in partnership with San Francisco-based Truvalue Labs, a provider of AI-driven ESG data. The first benchmark in this index series, the Solactive Truvalue ESG United States Index, uses Truvalue’s Volume and Insight scores—which it derives from ESG information not dependent on company disclosures, using natural-language processing and machine learning—for component selection, excluding exposure to fossil fuels, utilities, and tobacco companies.

S&P Puts Data on Snowflake Cloud

Cloud data platform operator Snowflake has begun providing cloud-based access to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s data, making it simpler for clients to incorporate multiple large datasets from S&P into their models or visualization tools by eliminating on-site data ingestion, and improving productivity and efficiency, officials say. Snowflake’s underlying Secure Data Sharing technology provides a platform for firms to find, share, and access content, including S&P’s financial, text, ESG, and alternative data, along with certain third-party data.          

SmartStream Adds Derivatives to SI Registry

SmartStream Technologies has added support for derivatives to its Systematic Internalizer Registry, to help clients identify who is responsible for reporting trades under Mifid II’s SI Regine, which now includes derivatives. The SI Registry is a centralized database, developed by SmartStream in partnership with APAs (Approved Publication Arrangements) including Bloomberg, Deutsche Borse, MarketAxess, TRADEcho and Tradeweb for Systemic Internalizers to register financial instruments in which they internalize trading. Officials say a new API that maps Isin-security identifiers to the Classes of Financial Instruments Approach (COFIA) also makes it simpler for firms to identify whether counterparties are classified as SIs for compliance.