Horizon Suite for Front Office workers in Insurance Institutions

Horizon is the product name of a suite of software products designed and built by Derivative Trading Systems (“DTS”) to provide state of the art analytics and financial market data to customers that work in the treasury and risk management areas of financial institutions including banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, institutional investors and corporate organizations.

The range of Horizon products include the following:

Horizon Premium
Open Horizon
Horizon Direct
Horizon COM.

The largest group of users of Horizon has traditionally been the front office user. Horizon Premium was originally designed as a tool to identify trading opportunities in the interest rate derivatives areas such as, swaps and options and has been extensively used by traders and quants to identify trading strategies or to test those strategies using historical data.

Horizon is not a replacement for other real-time data applications but has traditionally been used to complement those other applications.

Some of the main reasons that Horizon has been chosen by our front office users are as follows:

Horizon has one of the most extensive and accurate historical market rate databases. To see an up-to-date list of our historical data follow this link.

One of the most powerful aspects of the Horizon suite of products is the highly powerful and flexible Graph Definition Dialogue (“GDD”). The GDD gives the user the ability to easily create simple data expressions all the way up to the most complicated data analysis expressions. All without the need to write complex computer code.

The quality of the data is highly regarded by our customers who tend to be very loyal to our Horizon application even though they may have other real-time data applications that also provide some of the data they need to access. When you are analyzing data there is no substitute for quality information.

Unlike some of the competition, DTS is not a big monolithic company and has a reputation for being very responsive to users requests for data anomalies to be investigated. On the rare occasions that we or one of our customers finds data problems, we investigate them immediately and correct them if appropriate. We then send the corrections out to our users on a timely basis as we know how important accurate data is to our users.

As well as all the normal data analytical functions, Horizon has a range of analytical functions that are not available in other applications. Some of these are based on the extensive database of value added market data that is distributed with the Horizon database. Some examples of these functions can be seen by accessing the following link.

The Horizon products that are likely to be of interest to front office professionals that are involved in interest rate derivatives are as follows:

Horizon Premium

Our graphic program that is very popular with front office users. Some examples include:

For traders to identify and test trading opportunities based on historical data;
For sales staff to back up sales recommendations to customers with graphical presentations;
To look at trading strategies based on yield curve anomalies.

Open Horizon

Download the Horizon data to use for mark to market or for VAR analysis
Use Excel’s advanced features to do your own proprietary analysis

Horizon Direct

This is the light client version of Horizon Premium that accesses data from one of the DTS data servers via the internet. Ideal for home office users and those that are traveling away from the office and need to take Horizon with them.

Horizon COM

For our quant users and traders that like to write their own applications or to interface our quality data with applications like Matlab ©.

Some examples of the unique functions of Horizon can be seen by accessing the following link to our on-line demonstrations. If you are already a registered user you can view a full set of our on-line demonstrations here. If you would like to register to be able to view the full set of demonstrations please go to the registration link.

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