Ruth Yang, associate director, in the risk solutions division of Standard & Poor's has joined the LSTA as director of marketing data, to spearhead the effort to capture actual trade data and work on the leveraged loan index, launched last week. Yang explained the index is going to be important in the market and the opportunity to facilitate the flow of information is a great opportunity. Today is Yang's first day on the job. At the rating agency, Yang was responsible for recovery studies, primarily focusing on bankruptcy.
The LSTA has received commitments from buy-side institutions to deliver all their actual trade data to the LSTA to be used as an auditing tool for the LSTA/LPC mark-to-market pricing service, as an auditing service and as additional data points for the creation of derived pricing models. Yang will report to Allison Taylor, executive director of the LSTA and though Yang will work alone initially, in the future a team will be built. It is being discussed whether the LSTA will license the service or choose a market vendor.