Credit ratings & reported CDS
Source-qualified credit reference research for companies, financial institutions, funds and investment vehicles, bonds and structured instruments.
Open Global Bonds → Ratings & CDS. Company dossiers and Companies & Commodities issuer profiles provide contextual reference searches. Bank Run Monitor and Financial Stress link to the same workspace alongside their existing bank CDS reference table.
Agency rating references
The European Rating Platform (ERP), maintained by ESMA, publishes disclosures supplied by credit rating agencies. Watchtower provides bounded reference searches across its issuer and instrument records. Search a name or use the exact issuer LEI or instrument ISIN. Country, agency reporting code, source category, time horizon and withdrawal filters narrow the result.
- Counts are source rating records, not unique corporations or a claim that all ratings worldwide are covered. One issuer can have many agencies, horizons, currency bases and rated obligations.
- A rating is the issuing agency’s opinion. Preserve its original symbol, agency, rating type and national/global-scale qualifications. Watchtower does not invent equivalences or average grades.
- A parent, operating subsidiary, issuer, bond, programme and tranche are different rated objects. A fund holding or tranche rating is not automatically a fund-wide rating. Name matches are candidates; inspect identifiers and source-rated names.
- Issuer pages may use a dossier-supplied LEI. Matching that identifier to the source is not a separate verification that the original dossier resolved the correct company.
- Original agency action time, registry update time and retrieval time are separate. Old action dates stay old. A record without a withdrawal flag is not independent certification that the rating remains currently valid. Withdrawals, defaults, suspensions, watch/outlook statuses and missing statuses remain visible.
- The vehicle discovery filter combines source-classified structured finance with fund, REIT, trust and investment names. It can return investment companies or managers; it is not an exhaustive legal fund taxonomy.
ERP information is available free from the original register. Attribution and third-party agency rights remain applicable. Short reference fields are presented with source links; no agency research reports or commercial-feed entitlement are provided. Source access challenges and denials pause collection instead of triggering bypasses.
CDS disclosures and prices
DTCC Public Price Dissemination publishes credit transaction disclosures reported under SEC, CFTC and Canadian rules. Watchtower retains the available daily credit files within the last 366 closed UTC publication days, with bounded processing and explicit collection coverage. Publication can follow execution or the underlying event.
| Field | Meaning | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| Reported spread | The source’s spread value. Notation 3 means decimal × 10,000 to basis points; notation 4 is already basis points. Raw values and notation remain inspectable. | A continuous executable quote, standard five-year spread, or default probability. |
| Fixed rate / coupon | The contract’s fixed payment rate, shown separately when its format and product are qualified. | The market spread. A 100 or 500 bps coupon can coexist with an upfront payment. |
| Upfront / other payment | Reported monetary amount, currency and payment type. | A par spread. No unobserved discount curve or recovery assumption is supplied to convert it. |
| Notional with “+” | A capped published amount / lower bound. | Exact trade size, net exposure, capital at risk or insured loss. |
| UPI / underlier identifier | Source product and referenced-obligation/index identifiers. | An issuer LEI or automatic parent/subsidiary match. |
The source UPI FISN/product description distinguishes single-name CDS, index CDS, tranches, options and other credit derivatives. Unknown and monetary spread notations, missing values and reserved all-nine placeholders do not become zero or an invented basis-point quote. A genuine reported zero remains zero.
Original and superseding dissemination IDs are retained as strings. Corrections, cancellations/errors, superseded rows and corrections whose original falls outside the retained data remain labelled. A reference group’s latest disclosure may be a correction, cancellation, option or a different maturity. Inspect the row’s contract and lifecycle fields. “Eligible reported spread” means an ordinary CDS trade disclosure with a supported spread, a false package flag and no true non-standard or post-priced flag—not a market-wide current quote.
Generic labels such as “NT”, product descriptions and identifier-only labels are not treated as issuer names. A usable reported underlying-asset name is retained when available; otherwise the reference remains unidentified and scoped by reported product/underlier identifiers. Name searches return candidates and do not infer a legal-entity match.
Cross-jurisdiction reporting and Canadian provincial disclosures can overlap. Counts describe reports and reported underlier groups, not unique global trades or unique legal issuers. Notional amounts and different currencies are not summed into a global exposure total.
Existing bank reference and models
The BSW / CMA-ICE bank reference remains a separate selected-issuer five-year CDS premium table. Its reporting dates, holding-company boundaries and missing currency/seniority/restructuring details remain explicit. The original corporate credit dossier’s CDS proxy is a model output; it is not substituted for observed CDS. These new reference datasets do not change existing Watchtower risk scores or forecast outcomes.
Updates, gaps and pagination
Rating queries use a six-hour source cache. The daily-disclosure collector checks on a six-hour cadence, respects source pauses and Retry-After/backoff, and records which publisher-listed files were accepted or remain unavailable. The display shows source capture and observation dates. Source-unavailable, partial, backfilling and stale states stay explicit.
Queries return bounded pages. ERP cursor pagination follows the source ordering; the register can update between pages. Each returned page retains its own source capture. CDS pages carry a native data-generation token and reject a changed generation. MCP JSON-pointer pagination is separate from native dataset pagination. Full raw agency mirrors, private licensed feeds and user account data are excluded.