About Us | Credit Alpha | Forbes Elworthy, Robert Baker, Geoff Chaplin, Stephen Madle

About Credit Alpha

Credit Alpha is the brainchild of Forbes Elworthy who has a long history of delivering value in the credit markets. Forbes founded Credit Market Analysis in 2001 and sold the company to Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2006, CMA's Quotevision having become the de facto standard for CDS quote parsing.

WHAT OUR CLIENT BOARD MEMBERS SAY

The credit markets have established themselves as clear indicators, if not leading indicators, of activity in other markets including equity and cash bonds. As a manager of a global macro fund, my clients expect me to know where all the markets are, even if we, or they, are not outright investors in credit derivatives. Credit Alpha gives me that overview.
Peter Doherty, Partner, Tideway Investments

Credit Alpha is being built and developed by a group of leading industry experts who have proven track records in delivering value for clients.

The market is under-served in clear data visualisation tools. This has become clearer to me since I have been working in a smaller buy-side firm. When I worked in a large investment bank, we had endless resources, both technical and human, to analyse data and look for trading opportunities. Smaller firms need to be more efficient. Credit Alpha can help to highlight market inefficiencies very quickly.
Robert Reoch, Principal, New College Capital

The Credit Alpha Team

FOUNDER - FORBES ELWORTHY

Forbes founded Credit Alpha in 2008 after spotting a gap in data analysis in the credit markets. He leveraged his background in financial markets as previously, Forbes worked as a research analyst at Goldman Sachs and as a credit trader at Merrill Lynch, heading a convertibles trading desk. He subsequently founded a financial software company called Credit Market Analysis, which he sold to Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2008, returning 600% to investors.

Forbes is also the Principal of Craigmore Sustainables which he founded in 2009 to combine his interests in finance, agriculture and in improving the environment. Craigmore Sustainables' first venture is the Craigmore Forestry Fund, with a particular focus on high return New Zealand and Australian forestry. This fund invests in plantation forests, both growing valuable timber and earning carbon offsets for sequestering carbon dioxide.

Forbes was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and obtained an MBA at Harvard Business School. He lives in Oxfordshire with his family. His interests are in New Zealand farming, financial software and sustainable investments. He is currently learning to play polo.

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ADVISORY PARTNER - ROBERT BAKER

Robert Baker has spent nearly 20 years of his career in the financial services industry. He has worked at major investment banks such as Barclays Capital, ABN Amro, UBS Warburg, NatWest Markets and Rabobank as well as the hedge fund Solent Capital. He has developed risk management and valuation systems across most asset classes specialising in credit derivatives and has held positions as programmer, project manager, business analyst and head of technology.

Robert holds an MA in mathematics from Oxford University and recently authored "The Trade Lifecycle: Behind the Scenes of the Trading Process" (Wiley Finance, June 2010).

ADVISORY PARTNER - GEOFF CHAPLIN

Geoff is a credit derivatives practitioner with very strong academic skills and has extensive front office and risk control experience. His experience covers government fixed income, interest rate swaps and derivatives; defaultable bonds and credit derivatives; currency rates and derivatives; equity indices and derivatives; asset securitisations; life insurance products and securitisations. He has authored many published research papers in the Journal of the Faculty and Institute of Actuaries, Risk magazine, professional magazines and has spoken at numerous conferences. Geoff has also written "Credit Derivatives: Risk Management, Trading and Investing" (Wiley Finance 2005, second edition 2010), jointly authored "Credit Derivatives..." (IFR Research Series 2007) and is a co-author of "Life Settlements and Longevity Structures: Pricing and Risk Management", (Wiley 2010). He has held professional responsibilities in the Faculty of Actuaries and was Emeritus Professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, for over 10 years.

In addition to trading/structuring, academic and modelling skills Geoff has been continuously involved in systems development, IT management and programming and currently manages the development of the Reoch Credit Analytics Library in addition to a variety of consulting tasks.

ADVISORY PARTNER - STEPHEN MADLE

Stephen has over 10 years experience in Credit Derivatives IT, building teams and products that have provided innovative solutions to investment banks, hedge funds and structured credit vehicles.

Stephen is a graduate of Cambridge University and holds a Masters degree in Engineering