BST Awards 2024: Best buy-side data analytics tool—Suite LLC

Overview

ALib is a quantitative pricing and risk analytic library designed to support buy-side firms’ fixed-income cash and derivatives portfolio management functions. Its primary purpose is to help large fixed-income investment managers compute portfolio rate-sensitivity instantaneously to support dynamic hedging and alpha-generation strategies. Pre-execution pricing and hedging computations provide decision-support for trader actions geared toward portfolio rebalancing.

The solution  

ALib consumes large volumes of streaming fixed-income market data from which it instantaneously constructs yield curves and volatility surfaces that form the basis for pre-execution pricing and ongoing valuation, risk management and compliance reporting.

Secret sauce  

ALib was developed from the very outset through continuous collaboration among quants, traders and software engineers. Suite LLC focuses exclusively on the ALib analytic library; the functionality scope is well defined, such that fund managers are at liberty to choose their own market data vendors and ancillary technology platforms (operating systems, databases, security masters and programming languages, etc.) to suit their specific needs.

Recent milestones

A stream of improvements driven and vetted by quant strategists in response to evolving technical environments has resulted in a number of new releases in the past year. New features include enhanced curve routines that yield perspectives that strategists combine with their own intuition to navigate dynamic market landscapes. Additionally, new convenience functions such as the ability to create flexible bond objects make developers’ lives easier, add support for additional non-conforming issuances and reduce time to market with faster implementations.

Future objectives

Suite LLC will continue to add technical enhancements to ALib, enabling it to be supported through whichever interface or technology stack user-firms opt for. This includes allowing quants and technologists to use the tools they are most proficient in. For example, Excel users are not forced to learn Python, and Python or Matlab users aren’t forced to learn how to use Excel. Functionality initiatives include additional curve splining/interpolation methods developed in collaboration with industry practitioners.

Why they won

Suite LLC has finally cracked it. The Brooklyn, New York-based analytics specialist founded in August 2001 has been close to the winners’ circle in past years, but this is its first win across all of WatersTechnology’s various awards programs. The BST Awards has a history of recognizing and rewarding small, specialist third-party vendors that provide outstanding functionality to the global asset management industry. In this respect, Suite LLC with its impressive ALib offering fits the bill perfectly. Any tool that helps portfolio managers price and manage their risk associated with complex securities is sure to resonate with the buy side. This is especially the case when it comes to fixed-income securities, particularly those that are thinly traded, a perennial challenge for even the most experienced managers.      

Welcome, Suite LLC, to the BST Awards winners’ circle. This is surely not the last time we will see the firm and its outstanding ALib pricing and risk analytic library on the winners’ list in these awards.