Tag Archives: fixed income trading

Electronifying Corporate Bond Trading Chapter 12: Electronifie

MarketsMuse.com merges Fixed Income and FinTech with continuing coverage of the corporate bond market’s effort to evolutionize via electronification with a focus on yet the latest innovator initiative courtesy of Goldman Sachs alumni Amar Kuchinad and his start-up“Electronofie.” Our hats are off in salute to the catchy company name and extracts below are courtesy of recent profile in Fortune Magazine. Roger Daltry adds: “Dealers, Can You Hear Me?” Or, As Victor Hugo once wrote, “nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”

Fortune Mag’s Shawn Tulley “takes it away” starting here:

It sure looks like the Golden Age for bonds. The $7.7 trillion U.S. corporate fixed income market is the largest source of liquidity on the planet for companies, and individual investors, pension funds, and endowments are flocking to bonds as never before.

So it’s hard to believe that anything this important could be so trapped in the past. At America’s biggest, most-tech savvy asset managers, traders speed-dial their favorite Wall Street salesman to place their biggest orders over their trademark headphones, just as in the Liar’s Poker era. The electronic platforms that transformed the equity markets decades ago mainly never arrived for the bond market. Relative to stocks, big-ticket fixed-income trading is stuck in the Stone Age.

Naturally, the beneficiaries are the investment banks who charge fat markups and, frequently, their hedge fund clients, who feast off of the constant leaks on who’s buying and selling big chunks of bonds, information that Wall Street firms use to cement their most lucrative relationships. Continue reading

Electronic Trading of Corporate Bonds: Buy-Side Says: Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broken

Marketsmuse.com continues coverage of corporate bond electronic trading initiatives with outtake courtesy of coverage by Traders Magazine and column authored by Wall Street & Technology’s Ivy Schmerken. MM editor note: Since it was our chief honcho who coined the phrase “electronification of markets” 20 years ago, we’re also the first to say “If anyone has their pulse on fixed income electronic trading schemes, Ivy does.”

While new electronic venues are pushing to solve a liquidity shortage, buyside traders say the market is working fine, and they value dealer relationships.

Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken

Buyside traders say they are still finding liquidity from traditional voice dealers in the corporate bond market, though they will increase their usage of electronic venues for small trades to boost efficiency.

Despite concerns about a looming liquidity crisis and sellside balance sheets constraints, head traders speaking at an industry conference sponsored by Tabb Group said they mainly rely on voice traders to meet their liquidity needs.

Though the panel discussion was focused on the liquidity conundrum and the development of electronic bond trading networks, buyside traders said the market is working fine and they are not in a panic over a potential liquidity crisis.

“There are people confused as to where we are now and where they think we will be if we don’t see some automation or electronification of the market,” said Michael Nappi, VP Investment Grade Trader, Investment Grade FI at Eaton Vance. He said liquidity weaknesses do not affect all issues and sectors. Continue reading