Totem widens equity derivative valuation service

Totem Market Valuations, the London-based over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives valuation specialist, is to expand its service to include floored cliquet options this month.

Despite being commonly traded, dealers’ pricing of cliquets can prove contentious. Cliquets are equivalent to a series of forward-starting, at-the-money options, but with a single premium determined up front. Cliquets are embedded in several popular retail structures such as accumulators - capital protected structured notes with embedded options.

Totem’s service seeks to bring greater price transparency to the market by generating consensus prices for a variety of OTC contracts. “A number of clients were very keen for us to extend our service to include cliquets, so we began to do so in March this year,” said London-based Edward Barlow, co-founder of Totem Market Valuations.

Capital-protection is on investors’ minds at the moment, so products where clients sell capped cliquet puts to dealers, or purchase floored cliquet call spreads from dealers are relatively popular, said Herman Schoenmakers, a Paris-based equity derivatives trader at BNP Paribas.

The broad idea behind Totem's service is straightforward: dealers that are signed-up to its service submit price data on specified derivatives. The information is analysed and, after two rounds of sifting, any outliers queried or thrown-out. An average is then calculated and sent to the dealers. This information is useful because it allows dealers to see how their view of correlation, volatility and the smile – the variation of an option’s implied volatility with its strike price - compares with the market’s view.

Only users who have a paid subscription or are part of a corporate subscription are able to print or copy content.

To access these options, along with all other subscription benefits, please contact info@risk.net or view our subscription options here: http://subscriptions.risk.net/subscribe

You are currently unable to copy this content. Please contact info@risk.net to find out more.

You need to sign in to use this feature. If you don’t have a Risk.net account, please register for a trial.

Sign in
You are currently on corporate access.

To use this feature you will need an individual account. If you have one already please sign in.

Sign in.

Alternatively you can request an individual account here