NEW YORK, Jan. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services (FIRMS), an analytics and research unit separate from S&P's ratings business that delivers solutions to help investors perform cross-market analysis on the financial instruments in their portfolios, announced the launch of a new Valuation & Risk Strategies group. Bringing together independent research and analytics assets from across the business, the new Valuation & Risk Strategies group was formed to provide investors with a robust, cross-market approach to assessing risk and value in portfolios.

The core competencies of the new Valuation & Risk Strategies group include the following:

    --  Independent Securities Evaluations: Standard & Poor's Securities
        Evaluations provide independent, market-derived price evaluations on
        approximately three million hard-to-price fixed-income and structured
        finance securities daily.


    --  Valuation Scenario Services: Launched in 2009 to address illiquid
        securities analysis with intrinsic valuation, Valuation Scenario
        Services offers transparent assessments of structured finance portfolios
        under a range of different assumptions and economic scenarios.


    --  Market, Credit & Risk Strategies: An independent research team that
        combines market and credit risk analysis to better understand the
        relationship between asset price and risk, Market, Credit & Risk
        Strategies helps investors determine the degree to which they are being
        compensated for the risks they are taking.

"There are many ways to measure risk, but if the recent financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that asset price is the great equalizer in the fixed income markets," said Lou Eccleston, Executive Managing Director, Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services. "By combining our market-leading fixed income price evaluation and market research assets into a single unit, we are giving investors an innovative new perspective that will expand the vernacular used to describe credit and fixed income risk. Now, investors will have an independent and transparent assessment of how well they are being compensated by the market for the risk they are exposed to in their portfolios."

Available to Standard & Poor's customers globally through the S&P Global Credit Portal, the Valuation & Risk Strategies group resources incorporate a wide range of research, data and analytics. Offerings will address securities throughout the US, EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions.

About Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services

Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services delivers a portfolio of products and services to investors that serve the global financial markets by providing market intelligence and analytic insight for risk driven investment analysis, including for the debt, structured finance, derivative and credit markets. Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services are performed separately from any other analytic activity of Standard & Poor's. The unit has no access to non-public information received by other units of Standard & Poor's. Standard & Poor's does not trade on its own account.

About Standard & Poor's

Standard & Poor's, a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), is the world's foremost provider of independent credit ratings, indices, risk evaluation, investment research and data. With offices in 23 countries and markets, Standard & Poor's is an essential part of the world's financial infrastructure and has played a leading role for more than 140 years in providing investors with the independent benchmarks they need to feel more confident about their investment and financial decisions. For more information, visit http://www.standardandpoors.com.

SOURCE Standard & Poor's