SQX 2023 Year-in-Review

SQX Introduces New Products

U.S. Treasuries (Intraday)

• In 2023, SQX began offering comprehensive intraday pricing for the entire spectrum of U.S. treasuries, including treasury bills, bonds, notes, and strips. We provide evaluated prices across all key maturities, from short-term 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, 6-, and 12-month T-bills, to long-term 2-, 3-, 5-, 7-, 10-, 20-, and 30-year T-notes and bonds.
• With SQX treasury pricing, clients receive pricing updates delivered either end-of-day or intraday (every 15 minutes).
• Fields provided include Pricing Date/Time, Bond Type, Coupon, Maturity Date, U.S. Code, Bid, Ask, Bid Yield, and Ask Yield.

Catastrophe Bonds

• SQX is excited to offer both detailed pricing data and dynamic reference data for the full universe of catastrophe bonds.
• Our cat bond file updates daily, providing clients with price changes and field updates as soon as we know about them.
• Catastrophe bond fields provided include Date of Indication, Issue Size, Notional Outstanding, Current Principal Factor, Trigger Type, Bid Price, Ask Price, Bid Spread, Ask Spread, Bond, Sponsor, Mid Price, Mid Spread, U.S. Code, Expected Loss, Stated Coupon, and Risk.

SQX Improves Existing Products

Municipal Bonds

• In 2023, SQX increased our muni bond coverage by roughly 15%. We’re proud to announce that we now cover virtually the entire universe of municipal bonds.
• We’ve adjusted our muni pricing methodology hierarchy to increase output accuracy. Specifically, we’ve discovered that our evaluations based on historical quotes were so strong that we’ve increased inclusion of historical quotes in our pricing model. SQX customers can rely on the accuracy of our muni pricing model more than ever before. 

Corporate Bonds

• Our development team expanded our corporate bond coverage. We are excited to offer both pricing and reference data on a comprehensive universe of corporate bonds.
• Additionally, SQX now officially offers detailed corporate bond curves. We provide curves for corporate bonds of all credit ratings ranging from AAA to CCC.

Structured Notes

• In 2023, SQX radically increased our structured note coverage. Even at the beginning of 2023, SQX already had the broadest structured note coverage in the U.S. By the end of the year, we increased our coverage even further. We widened the coverage gap between us and our closest competitors, ensuring that SQX is the premier option for structured note pricing.

SQX Welcomes Four New Staff Members

• Raymond Hanus, Marketing and Creative Manager (March 2023). Raymond is responsible for SQX’s marketing efforts, including writing blogs and maintaining the SQX LinkedIn page. His interests include writing about himself in newsletters.

• Jayla Nicholas, Junior Developer (May 2023). Jayla assists the SQX team by maintaining SQX-related websites, designing, implementing, and enhancing bash scripts, as well as optimizing the SQX database. She’s easily the most fashionable SQX employee.

• Max Colbert, Software Engineer (June 2023). Max helps SQX in several different areas, including solving software-based problems, developing our API file delivery, and creating hilarious whiteboard memes.

• Sarah Engel, Sales and Business Analyst (September 2023). Sarah works as a sales representative for SQX, helping connect SQX with prospective clients, and maintaining relationships with prospects. She’s also our unofficial cookie provider.

Alternative Investments Product Growth

SQX has provided valuations for the universe of alternative investments—including REITS, DPPs, LPs, and Unregistered Securities (among others)—for over a decade.

However, in 2023, our alternative investments product grew in a whole new way. SQX has dramatically expanded our alts team, enabling us to provide per-share valuations on the full universe of alternative investments. We’ve established relationships with hundreds of issuers and sponsors who are now sending SQX regular pricing updates. 

As part of our alternative investments coverage, SQX provides FINRA 2231(c) monitoring, including explanatory notes. We audit our clients’ security universe, flagging duplicate securities, noting name changes, and recording securities that have been closed. We give our alts clients a single consolidated file, which includes current prices for all their securities. 

We’re proud of the incredible progress we’ve made in the world of alternative investments this year, and we’re looking forward to continued growth in 2024.

Added API for All Products

As of 2023, SQX officially offers the option to deliver all products through API! Whether our clients want muni bonds, alternative investments, structured notes, corporate bonds, U.S. treasuries, or catastrophe bonds, they may now choose to have their files delivered via API or SFTP. This addition increases SQX’s product accessibility, enabling us to serve a wider variety of clients.

Solidified SQX Vision, Mission, and Values

To make sure that SQX continues to move in a healthy direction, in 2023, we updated and expanded our vision, mission, and values statement. Both as individuals and as a company, this statement exists to keep us anchored to what we believe.

Vision:

• To be the customer-friendly, value-oriented alternative to the big market data vendors.

Mission:

• To provide responsive, high quality, cost-effective service to our clients.
• To promote employees’ engagement with their families and communities by providing a flexible work environment.
• To steward our financial and human resources to increase long-term profitability.

Values:

• Mutual Support
• Reliability
• Integrity
• Continuous Improvement
• Humility
• Responsible Stewardship

If you’re interested in hearing more, follow these links to read about our Vision, Mission, and Values.

2023 has been an incredible year, but we’re even more excited about what’s ahead for SQX in 2024! We’re eager to show you what’s up next—make sure you’re following us on LinkedIn to get all the SQX updates. Thank you for being a part of the SQX story!