Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator's Instructions) We'll take our first question from Ken Worthington of JP Morgan.
Ken Worthington - JP Morgan
Hi, good morning. I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into the financials around the CDS business. You spent a lot of money building up the CDS business and now that it's off the ground I've love to know if you could update us on the targeted return you expect on the investment? And even if you give us something more generic like an IRR that you expect in deals, I'd take that. But I'd love to figure out what needs to happen for you to get there. Because I think what we don't understand is what's gravy and what is part of your expectations. So for example, is buy-side clearing gravy or is that part of what you need to make CDS really work for you from an investment standpoint? Thanks.
Jeffrey C. Sprecher
Thanks for the question, Ken. We look at the overall credit investments we've made the same way we look at any deal. We take a very disciplined approach. We look for returns that are in excess of our weighted average cost of capital which is around 11%-12% so we typically target deals that will yield at least the 12% return so you can think of that as kind of the hurdle rate. And again, we're looking at the investments we've made collectively across the Creditex acquisition and the ICE Trust and ICE Clear Europe build outs as the investment upon which we'll deliver that return.
I think you'd be hard pressed with any investment six months in to say that it's actually where you expected it to be, but I would tell you that we have established a global leadership position and the CDS clearing business. We've cleared over $3 trillion. We're up to 13 clearing members in the US, 12 clearing members in Europe. We've got the index clearing going in both places. We're in tests right now with the buy side solution in the single name and we're operationally ready on both of those.
So, I feel very good about the position we've established. The things that we need in order to make the return on the investment come to fruition are continued performance in index, continuing to add new clearing members, continuing to bring the buy side in through our customer segregation platform, we get single names launched, and then frankly as we made the investment I don’t think any of us envisioned the CDS market quite imploding the way it did the month that we did the Creditex deal. It's not something we haven't seen before, it's the same thing that happened in the energy business, and so our expectation is what will really drive the return on this investment which is the CDS market recovery and people going back to viewing that product as a key place where they can hedge their credit risk and frankly treat the CDS almost as if they do equity today.
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