Last year’s winner, creditex, retains its title in 2003. The size of the task that creditex has set itself – increasing liquidity in credit derivatives through real-time pricing – and the degree of acceptance it is achieving among traders, make it stand out.
RealTime is creditex’s single-name credit default swap electronic trading platform, part of its hybrid interdealer brokerage. RealTime gives immediate price updates that are as close to live prices as the credit derivatives market can get. The tight bid-offer spreads suggest that the prices are good.
To have captured such a large chunk of the CDS market and allow traders to access bid and offer prices at trading levels is a unique achievement. Dealers like the way that RealTime is laid out on their desktops, with prices punched in or removed quickly and easily; colour coding to distinguish their own from other dealers’ prices; and the bar at the bottom of the screen where users can chart spreads or pull up data on a particular name for reference. They also appreciate other features, such as the trade blotter, customizable alerts and new e-mail chat facility.
PriceTracker, meanwhile, is a data delivery application that lets traders see historical bid and offer prices, graph these prices, and perform some analytics functions.