A rapidly growing hedge fund handling multiple long/short credit strategies was struggling with the volume and complexity of finding and then monitoring trade ideas in the public credit markets. Resource constraints at this relatively young company exacerbated the difficulties in staying on top of their trades and ahead of the markets. Their trades also required complex cross-currency and interest rate hedges.
Our Caliber Analyst was the solution enabling them to transform their investment process, improve returns and enhance efficiencies across the platform.
A large insurance company invested in the private credit market to capitalise on attractive returns in a growing sector. It provided loans to businesses in infrastructure and real estate. Although the credit team had strong analytical capabilities, they lacked a clear method for demonstrating compliance with the PRA’s regulatory expectations—particularly given the need for in-house expertise to assess this asset class.
Our Caliber Private delivered a tailored rating framework, drawing on comparisons with similar investments globally and across sectors. This equipped the insurer to optimise their matching adjustment and satisfy the regulator’s requirement to justify the credit default adjustment.
AlphaOne is a data product that allows Long/Short credit hedge funds to generate a shortlist of total return trade ideas.
- Bespoke scores and predictive trade ideas across IG and HY
- Assistance with the creation of custom market-neutral credit strategies
- Pair trades
Caliber Signal is a multi-algorithmic model that generates predictive trade insights and risk recommendations, helping investors proactively manage risk and identify emerging investment opportunities.
- Off-the-shelf caliber signal for public credit securities
- Pricing and risk recommendations
- Delivered daily via API or CSV
Mid-size asset manager faced a hard ceiling on its credit research output. Each analyst typically produced one to two one-page research notes per day — earnings reviews, M&A reviews, new-issue notes, and credit recommendations with investment views. The team was productive by industry standards, but the universe of names worth covering grew faster than the team could grow with it. New-issue analytical work consistently missed the syndicate window where decisions are actually made, and portfolio managers were dependent on analyst availability — when an analyst was on leave or stretched across multiple names, the credit view simply was not produced. The constraint was structural: the firm could not grow research output without growing headcount.
Caliber Research is a proprietary credit research engine built for public and private credit. It generates the Caliber Research Rating on a 23-band scale and Rating Trajectory shown alongside your internal or agency ratings so the gap to consensus is visible by design. Core report types include credit research with investment recommendations, relative value reports, M&A review, and new-issue analysis, with a custom report builder supporting a much wider range of bespoke formats tailored to each client’s research framework. Reports are generated in minutes with full source attribution on every output, and an analyst can review, refine, and sign off rather than spend the day producing the first draft from scratch.
- Analyst Productivity More Than Doubled – Analysts moved from producing one to two notes per day to several daily, on a meaningfully wider universe. The same team now covers names previously outside reach — the broader high-yield and private credit segments where structural information asymmetry is highest and competitive edge most accessible.
- PMs Now Self-Serve, Not Analyst-Dependent – Portfolio managers generate full credit reports on demand, including when the covering analyst is absent or stretched across multiple names. Investment decisions no longer wait for analyst availability — a structural unblock on the firm’s ability to act on time-sensitive opportunities.
- New-Issue Window Captured, Not Missed – Full new-issue analytical packs produced at deal pricing rather than a day later. The firm now participates in primary deals with the analytical depth previously only available on day-two secondary trading, materially improving allocation outcomes in the most decision-pressured window in credit markets.
Providing Market-To-Market (MTM) analysis is a challenge for all private credit investors. Fund reporting is vital for fair redemptions if open and for investor confidence if closed. Pension fund trustees (and insurance company investors) need to justify to auditors and to regulators MTM moves driven by credit and liquidity issues
- Trustees and investors can provide reliable information on MTM levels and risk to regulators and auditors. Enhanced compliance and comparisons enabled. Risk management improved. Time saved.
- Intelligent Optimization and Monitoring Engine – Generates high-performance portfolios while strictly adhering to custom constraints.
- Dynamic Data Integration – Ensures real-time portfolio updates, eliminating outdated data issues.
- Enhanced Liquidity & Cost Analysis – Incorporates transaction costs and liquidity considerations for optimal trade execution.
- Alternative Trade Recommendations – Provides a curated list of similar trades to enhance portfolio performance.
- Portfolio Construction and Rebalancing Time Cut from Days to Seconds – PMs and Quants now work with close to real-time data, ensuring optimal investment decisions.
- Improved Portfolio Performance – Improved internal risk scores and/or returns across all portfolios without materially deviating from a selected benchmark.
- 100% Compliance with Constraints – Proactive elimination of possible breaches while maintaining investment strategy integrity.
- Having relevant trade ideas at the time of rebalancing streamlines the investment process while the quality of our models helps to generate meaningful outperformance. The availability of closely matched longs and shorts allows for creation of a naturally hedged portfolio, isolating alpha and reducing hedging costs.
Insurer’s public credit investment team operated reactively to rating action. The team learned of agency downgrades only after S&P or Moody’s announced them — at which point spreads had already widened, capital charges under Solvency II / NAIC RBC had already stepped up, and any rotation out of the name had to be executed at distressed levels. Internal credit views existed but were produced manually, name-by-name, and could not be refreshed across the held-to-maturity universe with the frequency that mattered. The investment team had analytical capacity to react to surprises; what it needed was a way to stop being surprised.
Caliber Signal is a multi-algorithmic AI-powered scoring engine for public credit. It generates the IBT Score on every name in the investable universe daily, combining credit rating direction prediction, spread prediction, sentiment, liquidity, and credit risk into one composite. The rating direction layer specifically anchors to the prevailing agency rating and predicts upgrade / downgrade / stable outcomes for 1, 2, 3, and 4 quarters forward, each with a low / medium / high confidence band. Every holding is monitored continuously — names showing predicted migration weeks ahead of agency action surface automatically in the team’s daily watch list, with the full signal stack and source attribution available for review.
- Proactive Downgrade Identification – The team now identifies likely downgrades weeks before agency action, on the names the agencies move and at confidence levels the team can act on. The team evaluates, decides, and rotates ahead of the spread move, capturing materially tighter execution than the post-announcement market provides.
- Capital Footprint Materially More Stable – Reduction in surprise rating migrations directly reduces forced step-ups in Solvency II / NAIC RBC capital charges. The book’s capital trajectory becomes a function of deliberate positioning rather than agency-driven surprise.
- Forward-Looking Internal Credit View, Evidenced – Continuous IBT Score and rating-direction outputs provide a documented, auditable forward-looking credit view on every holding — the kind of internal credit assessment Article 5922 (Solvency II) and Model Act #505 (NAIC) increasingly require carriers to evidence.
