Barra Credit
Tools to improve the credit investment process.

Barra Credit is a decision support and risk management system designed to facilitate and improve the credit investment process. Barra Credit contains three complementary modules that support quantitative portfolio monitoring, issuer analysis, and pricing of credit risky assets. Barra Credit is used by bond portfolio managers and credit analysts to obtain quantitative insight into issuer creditworthiness. Barra Credit is used during the investment decision making process and for on-going portfolio monitoring. The system makes available the Barra Default Probability model, which is a sophisticated model of the capital structure of a firm. The Barra Default Probability model has been shown to be a leading indicator of rating agency downgrades and defaults in both the investment grade and high yield space.

Barra Credit empowers credit derivatives and synthetic CDO investors with the ability to perform independent pricing and risk measurement of these positions. Barra Credit's valuation tools are independent, documented, and auditable.

Barra Credit is used by hedge funds to evaluate capital structure arbitrage trading strategies. The Barra Default Probability model and the Empirical Credit Risk model allows a user to understand the relationship between equity, equity volatility, bond spread and CDS spread.

Barra Credit includes three modules:

	Barra Credit Portal: A web-based application designed to monitor the credit risk of corporate issuers. The Portal makes available measures of default probability and bond spread risk generated from Barra’s proprietary credit models.
	Barra Credit Pricing: A set of pricing models designed to support mark-to-market, hedging and risk analysis of credit risky instruments such as Bonds, Asset Swaps, CDS, CDS options, basket CDS and Synthetic CDO products. Gives investors the tools needed to perform independent pricing of their credit derivative and synthetic CDO positions.
	Barra Credit Data: Data files with Barra Default Probability for use in third-party or in-house systems.

Please have someone contact me immediately regarding Barra Credit.