Deutsche Bank's eDerivatives site has a richness of content and a depth of integration across the firm's businesses that is unrivalled among the sites that Euromoney saw this year.
The site covers several fields, including equity options strategy, relative value arbitrage and portfolio research. So it has information and data on areas as diverse as merger arbitrage, mispricings between different share classes of the same company, directional volatility trades, futures fair value, convertible arbitrage, regulatory issues, and changes in index constituents.
"I'm on it all day," says one user, a former O'Connor derivatives trader who now manages a hedge fund. "We use it do things like overlay historical volatilities on different durations and skews to set up convergence trades. Before, doing this would have meant lots of manual inputting of data for us."
The site covers the basics that every research platform needs - users can download research publications, arrange to receive email updates and contact Deutsche staff. More dynamic and interesting, though, is the array of canned daily analytic reports on various aspects of the global equity derivatives markets that the site creates automatically. For instance, users can see daily reports on the richest and cheapest stocks on an implied volatility basis - the default market is the S&P500, but it's possible to look at almost any other.