Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB)
CSFB has a suite of products: PrimeTrade, PrimeRisk and PrimeWorld. These should appeal to traders, risk managers and corporate treasurers, primarily in fixed income markets.
PrimeTrade
PrimeTrade is an order-routing system that provides trading capabilities for listed derivatives, foreign exchange, and Eurobonds. Users can access markets 24 hours a day, six days a week. It allows integrating execution and clearing functions, and lets the user follow the status of orders precisely, from inception (registering and execution), to the allocation, clearing, and settlement process.
It enables users to monitor positions and margin accounts in real time, and measures the value at risk of their portfolios for a broad set of fixed-income securities. An audit trail function follows the status of orders in real time.
The system also allows users to customize their own window, without forfeiting any market data. The product is well designed, fast, with all sorts of bells, whistles and metrics for the sophisticated trader. And end-users benefit from low transaction costs, paying about $1 per contract. PrimeTrade incorporates different levels of access, which guarantees security. On the negative side, not all features were working at the time of the demo, with "links" to research not yet operational and no analytics accessible at that time.