On Thursday, fixed-income electronic trading platform MarketAxess announced the launch of Live Markets, a live order book trading model for the institutional fixed-income markets.
The new platform will create a single view of two-way, actionable prices for the most active bonds in the market, including newly issued debt, benchmark issues and news-driven securities.
It is expected to launch in the second half of 2019. It will be accessible from traditional request-for-quote (RFQ) protocols and will be anonymous.
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Rick McVey, |
“Timing is everything with respect to releasing new protocols,” says Rick McVey, MarketAxess CEO, speaking from the firm’s Hudson Yards office in New York together with Kevin McPartland, head of market structure and technology research at Greenwich Associates.
McPartland says that when Greenwich Associates conducted an e-trading survey in 1999 it found that 9% of bond traders were trading electronically. The equivalent survey in 2018 found that 91% were.
“Now we are amazed that 9% aren’t,” he points out.
McVey explains: “We are getting to the point where there is enough automation on both sides that we are comfortable that a live trading market will work.
