The RIXML industry consortium has released version 2.1 of the Research Information Exchange Mark-up Language (RIXML) standard which includes classifications to address ratings for both equity and fixed income markets.
The specification now features a rating relationship indicator to give context to the rating, and a volatility indicator to signal the potential price fluctuation of the rated entity.
The RIXML group has also renamed the recommendation element to 'rating' in an attempt to match the terminology used by publishers and has renamed the buy, hold, sell and no recommendation values to positive sentiment, neutral sentiment, negative sentiment and no rating respectively.
Andrew Ling of UBS and sell-side co-chair of the RIXML.org steering committee, says the industry has experienced a broad shift in the way research publishers provide ratings for covered companies: "As the regulatory climate has changed, we have adjusted RIXML to be better matched to what research publishers are doing today."
RIXML 2.1 is available on the organisation's Web site which has recently been redesigned to include an interactive demo and educational section that describes and demonstrates how the specification works.