Investortools Inc.

A wholly-owned affilitate of Investortools Inc., Merritt has paired up its Data with Investortools definitive resource tool, CreditScope.

CreditScope

CreditScope is high performance analysis software tool that has brought the art of analysis to a new level. Created primarily for fixed income portfolio managers and securities analysts, it is used for both municipal and corporate securities. CreditScope provides the necessary means to perform superior analysis through the main functions of data viewing, data manipulation and portfolio holding / linking.

Data viewing, although the most fundamental, has been deemed by many to be the most valuable. CreditScope presents the data in an industry-consistent manner that allows the user to formulate an opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of a credit. For example, the finance detail screen presents a Balance Sheet, Statement of Operations and a Statement of Cash Flows.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of CreditScope is the many ways it allows the user to manipulate the data. The four analytical tools that CreditScope provides are: report writing, spreadsheet analysis, graphing and Word/Excel exports. These four devices, combined with an objective user, provide the capability for very dexterous comparative analysis.

The feature that distinguishes CreditScope from the competition is the ability to link your holdings to its associated obligor. This amazing concept provides the means to analyze your portfolio holdings based on credit quality, a feature offered exclusively by CreditScope.

High Performance

From the time stamped, cached database design through the efficiency of the custom report writer, CreditScope is tuned for high performance. The system will run on any standard PC network (or individual PC) that supports standard file locking functions. The application is designed to support multiple concurrent users with a minimum of delays. An innovative time-stamping approach allows fast access to consistent snapshots of the database without excessive copying or locking of records. Frequently accessed data is cached at individual PC's, allowing near-single-user responsiveness because of minimum network traffic.

Filter & Sort

CreditScope includes an elegant custom report writer. Users can build new custom reports easily, without memorizing field names. The underlying system architecture permits extremely fast custom report generation.

Reports list credits or issues that meet user-defined criteria, in a user-defined order and format. These reports can be displayed on the screen and also can be sent to a printer, to a disk or to a standard worksheet format. Mouse clicking any line of a screen report gives access to the detailed information provided by Merritt Research Services data. Report formats are storable for re-use, making complex queries routine.

Benchmark

Spreadsheet analysis is the definitive comparison tool. Imagine having the ability to compare an individual obligor to industry medians, rating medians, and its closest competitors. CreditScope gives you all of this ability with its custom comparative analytics tool.

Visualize

The CreditScope graphing tool provides two separate methods for comparative credit analytics. CreditScope provides advanced credit research capabilities through scatter and bar graphs. Use these graphs to identify correlations, or to identify industry trends. Once you’ve created a graph, identify the outliers by simply highlighting them. An excellent research tool, the CreditScope graphing tool is another example of our commitment to providing the best analytical research system possible.

Export

Currently using a Word document for your surveillance/acquisition reports? Have you created a customized Excel spreadsheet that calculates internal ratios? CreditScope incorporates your customized formats into a seamless interface, allowing you to automatically import the data from CreditScope into your custom spreadsheet or document. The data is automatically entered into your format at the click of a button

Tie It All Together

Through the combined use of CreditScope and a portfolio accounting tool, such as Perform, a user is able to link portfolio holdings to the underlying credits which issue debt. When a holding is linked directly to a credit, the user is able to judge performance of a holding based on the financial performance of its associated credit. This function takes advantage of common development between the two software products to offer a previously unattained level of portfolio management. This linking process is possible due to the three separate levels of data architecture:

  • Credit Level Information - Focuses on the foundation of creditworthiness that supports outstanding indebtedness including elements of credit strength or weakness as revealed by current and historical financial and non-financial data.

  • Issue Level Information - Any single credit can have one or more securities issues associated with it. CreditScope provides access to important information found in the associated Official Statement (OS).

  • Holding (CUSIP) Level Information - Focuses on descriptive, acquisition and market pricing information as it relates to potentially thousands of specific securities associated with each credit and each issue. In most cases these will be holdings of users' portfolios.