Best bank site for bond trading
Goldman Sachs
In September this year, Goldman Sachs was proud that by 8am London time every day, about 100 people would be logged on to its Web.ET platform. Half way through October, that morning figure hits 215 to 250.
If you believe the consortium site hype, you may wonder what all those people are doing. This is a single bank site combining bonds trading and foreign exchange – both functions that investors can perform elsewhere, on consortium sites or on Bloomberg systems.
But Goldman Sachs is proving that the single bank site is not dead. Until consortia offer a range of products in one place, investors will still need single-bank multi-product offerings. Michael Zamkow, a managing director at Goldman Sachs in London, oversees Web.ET. He says: “Consortia are going to develop in a big way, and they are going to follow the model of TradeWeb. But Web.ET will always have benefits for users as it has the ability to add new products very effectively.”
Very few banks have their own trading platform. Those that do tend to use it only for commoditized products such as US treasuries. One European bank showed euromoney.com a web platform trading about 40 Bunds and even fewer French OATs.