10.3 INSTRUMENT GROUP STATIC DATA

Individual instruments of the same type obviously have similarities to each other. It is therefore a useful concept in an investment industry application to hold a table of user-defined instrument groups, so that all individual instruments that are members of a group can inherit characteristics of that group.

The major advantage of using instrument groups are that when an attribute changes, the data need only be changed for the group, rather than for all the (potentially thousands of) instruments that are members of that group.

The firm can hold two types of data at instrument group level:

• “Hard data”: Attributes of the group that all industry participants would agree with
• “Soft data”: Attributes of the group that are specific to this firm.