Financial Engineering Associates (FEA) was founded in 1989 by Mark B. Garman, Professor (now Emeritus) of Finance at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. FEA grew rapidly in its library software offerings, and quickly established a leading position in the nascent financial analytics market. In 1991, FEA began providing software as Lotus® 1-2-3® add-ins and later, as Microsoft® Excel add-ins. Today, Excel add-ins continue to be important to FEA’s customer base as a "jump-start" solution, providing quick deployment by front-office and middle-office users. In 1994, FEA was invited to join the J. P. Morgan RiskMetrics initiative. FEA was one of a small number of original RiskMetrics partners who committed to the development of a stand-alone risk engine, anticipating that risk management was fundamentally an enterprise activity, and not simply an extension of a single-asset-class portfolio management system. Today, FEA’s risk engine, VaRworks, incorporates all of the popular risk methodologies, as well as scenario analysis. In 1996, FEA created a truly breakthrough development, patenting the revolutionary VaRdelta technology that allows a customer institution to determine the effect on its risk position of adding or deleting trades, without having to recalculate VaR for the entire portfolio. Building on the VaRdelta foundation in 1997, FEA introduced Component VaR, a proprietary technique for the partitioning and attribution of the sources of portfolio risk. The importance of Component VaR is that it is the sole additive and incrementally correct attribution of risk. In 1997-98, FEA moved into the rapidly growing energy analytics market and has established itself as a dominant supplier in this technically difficult field. FEA ia a world leader in risk analytics and in applying cutting-edge theory to overcome the complex problems posed by highly volatile and seasonal prices, especially those found in electricity markets. During this period, FEA has also pioneered the use of derivatives-based techniques for asset and facility ("real options") valuation. To date, over 700 banks, trading houses, auditors, energy firms, and utilities have chosen FEA software products as the cornerstone of their trading and risk management strategies. FEA has clients in 50 different countries, and its trade-level analytics are well respected in a wide range of different industry sectors, including energy, fixed income, commodities, foreign exchange, and equities. FEA’s portfolio-level analytics, VaRworks, is used by clients for value-at-risk calculations, exchange margining roles, and wealth management applications. In December, 2002, FEA was acquired by Barra, Inc and in June 2004, Barra combined its operations with the operations of MSCI. To learn more about how different industries use FEA software, please visit our Browse by Industry section, or to learn more about our software, please visit our Products section.