A cautious embrace

Synthetic credit index products have been available for a little over a year. Navroz Patel finds out what impact this has had upon the end-user community

Equity investors have been able to easily go long or short their benchmark indexesvia derivatives for more than 20 years. Their credit-investing counterparts havenot been so lucky – they’ve been hamstrung by the lack of both liquid,relevant indexes and the ability to position against those indexes. But not anymore. In the past 18 months, a number of dealers have launched a variety of indexproducts – some of which are synthetic, built on the back of the boomingsingle-name credit default swap