Why Fixed Income Relative Value Analysis Needs a Rethink
Institutional fixed income teams are operating in a market defined by rate uncertainty, geopolitical risk, spread compression, and constant repricing. Yet for many portfolio managers and traders, one of the most important daily workflows still depends on spreadsheets, manual comparisons, and fragmented market context. That gap matters. Relative Value Analysis helps market participants make faster, better-informed decisions about what to buy, what to sell, and where to allocate capital.
The goal? To turn relative value from a manual exercise into a real-time, configurable, and actionable decision framework.
The market has outgrown spreadsheet-based workflows
Spreadsheets may still be common, but they were not built for today’s fixed income market. Traders are evaluating thousands of bonds under time pressure, while portfolio managers are comparing sectors, structures, ratings, and maturity buckets in markets that can shift quickly. That requires more than static rich/cheap screens.
It requires workflows that support:
- Bond vs. Bond comparisons for specific trade ideas,
- Bond vs. Cohort analysis for more meaningful security selection, and
- Cohort vs. Cohort views for higher-level allocation decisions.
Static tools can indicate whether something looks attractive on paper, but they often struggle to show whether that opportunity is relevant, defensible, or actionable right now. The need is no longer just for more data. SOLVE Relative Value Analysis delivers better workflows that support both security selection and portfolio-level decision-making.
Bond vs. Bond
Foundational relative value view for evaluating specific trade ideas.
Bond vs. Cohort
Evaluate a bond against a dynamically generated peer group with similar characteristics.
Cohort vs. Cohort
Compare one market segment against another to identify where value may be building.
Real innovation starts with trusted data
AI only works if the data underneath it is right. That has been SOLVE’s focus since 2011: establishing ground truth and capturing the market signals that matter. From there, SOLVE built predictive pricing across both liquid and highly illiquid securities, creating a real-time foundation for deeper analytics. That is what makes Relative Value Analysis possible. With SOLVE Px (for Munis and Corporate Bonds) and SOLVE Quotes working together, users can evaluate a bond against its history, against comparable securities, or against a cohort defined on their own terms. And because SOLVE Quotes provides actual bids and offers in the market, the analysis you conduct is actionable, not just theoretical: you don’t just find the bonds that look good, you see which of them are available in the market right now. Just as important, explainability comes through rigorous backtesting and confidence score models. In fixed income, innovation is not just about using AI. It is about creating analytics that are accurate, understandable, and usable in real decision-making.
The direction is clear: fixed income workflows are moving toward more real-time, data-driven, and explainable decision-making. To see how SOLVE is redefining relative value analysis, visit www.solvefixedincome.com/redefined-rv.
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About SOLVE
SOLVE is the leading market data platform provider for fixed-income securities, trusted by sophisticated buy-side and sell-side firms worldwide. Founded in 2011, SOLVE leverages its AI-driven technology and deep industry expertise to offer unparalleled transparency into markets, reduce risk, and save hundreds of hours across front-office workflows. With the largest real-time datasets for Securitized Products, Municipal Bonds, Corporate Bonds, Syndicated Bank Loans, Convertible Bonds, CDS, and Private Credit, SOLVE empowers clients to transform the way they bring new securities to market, trade on secondary markets, and value highly illiquid securities. Headquartered in Connecticut, with offices across the globe, SOLVE is the definitive source for market pricing in fixed-income markets.
