Webinar | Recent Developments in Municipal Bond Data & Analytics

21st May 2020

The municipal bond market - once a sleepy dinosaur - continues to experience rapid changes in trading, pricing and analysis. Vendor consolidation is prompting a re-consideration of traditional operational and benchmarking practices, technology is changing how the market trades and prices, and regulation such as the Liquidity Risk Management rules for mutual funds requires significant development.

Voltaire Advisors, in association with a group of industry experts, are conducting ongoing research on how Muni market firms and professionals are reacting to these changes and what kinds of issues and challenges they face in the process.

This webinar discusses some of the latest issues and challenges in the area.

Speakers

• Callable Taxable Munis Provide Hidden Value for Investors | Andy Kalotay, Kalotay Analytics
• Machine Learning & Municipal Bond Pricing | Unmesh Bhide, PricingDirect
• Liquidity Risk & Indices | Robert Kane, BondView

Andy Kalotay | President, Andrew Kalotay Associates

Andrew Kalotay is a leading authority on the valuation and risk management of municipal bonds. His contributions include the patent-pending tax-neutral methodology, which extends conventional OAS analysis to discount munis. The tax-neutral approach has been has been implemented by major asset managers, including BlackRock. His book ‘Risk Management of Municipal Bonds’ is forthcoming.

Before establishing Andrew Kalotay Associates in 1990, Dr. Kalotay was with Salomon Brothers. Prior to Wall Street, he was at Bell Laboratories and AT&T. On the academic side, he was the founding director of the graduate Financial Engineering program at Polytechnic University (now part of NYU). He has numerous publications in both refereed journals and in the trade press.

Dr. Kalotay holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Queen's University and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, all in mathematics.  He was inducted into the Fixed Income Analyst Society’s "Hall of Fame" in 1997.

Unmesh Bhide | Managing Director, JP Morgan PricingDirect

Unmesh Bhide is a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan and Co-Founder of PricingDirect, overseeing daily operations and developing pricing algorithms. PricingDirect provides independent evaluated pricing (valuation and pricing data) for more than 2.5 million U.S. taxable fixed income securities and derivatives daily. Mr. Bhide currently serves as the head of product methodology, and led the development efforts of PricingDirect’s valuation methodology for a variety of instruments spanning across 40 unique asset classes. He is the driving force behind the implementation of machine learning in PricingDirect’s recently launched muni pricing service.

Prior to joining the firm in 1997, Mr. Bhide worked at the Merrill Lynch Pricing Service where he developed pricing models. He also served as an analyst in the fixed income portfolio management group at Daiwa Securities Trust Company.

Mr. Bhide earned a B.S. in Physics from the University of Bombay, an M.S. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Charter Financial Institute and a CFA charterholder since 1997.

Robert Kane | CEO, BondView

Robert Kane is a 25 year veteran of the financial technology industry. Mr Kane worked at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Citibank in the fixed income & technology groups. He is a leading advocate on municipal bond transparency, liquidity assessment and their underlying technologies.

He has presented to The Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission. His industry comments are published in the U.S. Congressional Record, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He is frequent media commentator.

Mr. Kane moved from Goldman Sachs to found Intrusion Detection Inc., a successful cybersecurity company with much of the Fortune 500 as customers. He lead the company’s growth and engineered its sale to publicly traded RSA Security (Nasdaq: RSAS). As an Executive Vice President at RSA, he managed the strategic security relationships with Google, Apple and other Fortune 100 firms. Robert is a founding member of New York Angels and was an early investor in several successful technology companies.