I am interested in historic CDS data. I have been comparing 2 vendors, CMA and Markit. Does anyone have any opinions about which is better?

don't know who CMA are but markit were set up by a conglomerate of banks to provide consensus cds pricing using red numbers for reference obligations and i'd be very surprised if CMA can better them

CMA wrote the QuoteVision product - I used to work for them. I currently use Markit as it is industry standard - given the choice I would go with Markit

Another point, RED is exclusively for Markit and I don't believe CMA is allowed to use it. This may potentially bring inconvenience if you use CMA.Ted

QuoteOriginally posted by: guotedAnother point, RED is exclusively for Markit and I don't believe CMA is allowed to use it. This may potentially bring inconvenience if you use CMA.TedTed,Not sure on legalities but it would appear they support ithttp://www.cmavision.com/News/QuoteVision_to_s ... RED_codes/

Interesting... I remembered that I was told by someone otherwise... maybe i was under the impression for a different product of CMA.Can some expert here confirm or deny whether CMA is allowed to use Markit's RED to identify reference entities?Thanks,Ted

i work with both cma (Quotevision) and markit data at work. QuoteVision has lot of inconsistent data when they started out but the data is getting better within the last 12 months or so. For liquid quotes, their quotes are market quotes. For illiquid maturities (1,2,3y,15,20,30Y), they do inter/exterpolation. The good thing about QuoteVision is that you can filter the data better than CMA once you get a hang of their algorithm pro/con.As for Markit, they give you only a snapshot at the end of the day and as I understand it, they do lot of interpolation because they don't have enough dealers to contribute.

I can confirm that CMA uses redcode. You can enter it into the GUI instead of entityId. The mapping is loaded into memory when you first start the program. It's not in the database, however.

QuoteOriginally posted by: CDQNi work with both cma (Quotevision) and markit data at work. QuoteVision has lot of inconsistent data when they started out but the data is getting better within the last 12 months or so. For liquid quotes, their quotes are market quotes. For illiquid maturities (1,2,3y,15,20,30Y), they do inter/exterpolation. The good thing about QuoteVision is that you can filter the data better than CMA once you get a hang of their algorithm pro/con.As for Markit, they give you only a snapshot at the end of the day and as I understand it, they do lot of interpolation because they don't have enough dealers to contribute.Markit are doing intraday now - currently evaluating

The last post here is about 4 years old. Has this changed in any way since then? I mean, how would we rate CMA vs Markit today - in terms of data availability, consistency, etc.