London and New York, NY – Markit, a leading, global financial information services company, today announced it has extended the range of instruments covered by its Portfolio Valuations service to include commodities.  The addition of commodities is a major milestone in Markit’s ongoing program to develop a comprehensive, independent valuations service.

Markit now provides valuations for commodity derivatives such as forwards, swaps (bullet swaps, averaging swaps, spreads and basis swaps) and vanilla options.  The markets covered include:

• Oil, refined products and chemicals
• Natural gas and power (North America and Europe)
• Base metals
• Precious metals
• Agriculture and other soft products
• Coal
• Emissions
• Freight
• Commodity indices

Valuations are provided on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  Markit’s valuations are calculated using industry-standard models and a wide variety of data inputs sourced from market-making banks, exchanges, clearing houses, inter-dealer brokers and participants in the physical commodities markets.

Markit’s Portfolio Valuations service provides independent, post-trade asset pricing to mutual funds, hedge funds, traditional asset managers, fund administrators, custodians, private banks and corporates.  The service covers a range of cash and derivative instruments – both vanilla and exotic – across the major asset classes. 

Kevin Borrett, Managing Director of Portfolio Valuations at Markit, said: “We are pleased to have added commodities to our Portfolio Valuations service which provides independent valuations for all the major OTC derivative markets.  Commodity derivatives represent a very large and active asset class and our clients will benefit from the additional transparency we will provide through our new service.”