Corporate Bond Traders Turn to Bloomberg for Resolution of Credit Market Illiquidity
Bloomberg Credit Announces Significant Volume Uptick in USD and CAD Denominated Cash Corporate Trade Activity via its Bid/Offer List Trading Application BOLT <GO>
NEW YORK, May 17, 2017 – Bloomberg continues to build on its role as a leading data and technology provider for fixed income professionals, announcing a significant uptick in the use of its Bid/Offer List Trading application (BOLT <GO> on the Bloomberg Professional service) among buy side and sell side participants trading U.S. Dollar and Canadian Dollar denominated corporate bonds.
According to a recent report from Greenwich Associates, more than four-fifths of the U.S. corporate bonds traded annually (roughly $6 trillion in value) are still matched and executed over the phone. Until recently, many traders based in Canada relied on manual tasks to complete these trades, entering quote data into spreadsheets and emailing grids to interested trading partners. By allowing market participants to electronically request and receive bid/offer quotes via a streamlined workflow, BOLT <GO> has facilitated faster, more efficient trading across the global fixed income market as market participants continue to struggle with available liquidity.
The platform has also started to see international trade activity, with market participants adopting BOLT to facilitate trading both USD- and CAD-denominated corporate bonds. In Q1 2017, trade volume executed by users of BOLT’s service across these types of corporate bonds saw an average month-over-month increase of 54.1 percent.
“BOLT joins a growing suite of credit solutions across news, data, analytics and trading platforms for all credit products,” said Nicholas Bean, Head of Product, Fixed Income Trading at Bloomberg. “As the electronic trading landscape continues to evolve, Bloomberg’s solutions are allowing market participants to become more competitive within the international fixed income marketplace.”
Bloomberg Credit continues to expand the breadth of its product offerings. In addition to supporting trading for Cash Credit, CDS indices, CDS single-names and CDS options, Bloomberg recently launched Total Return Swaps on the Bloomberg Barclays Indices.
“As investors continue to encounter hurdles with credit market liquidity, technology providers are diligently working to ease this pain,” said Kevin McPartland, Head of Research for Market Structure and Technology at Greenwich Associates. “Recent Greenwich Associates research found that more than 80 percent of credit investors in the U.S. and Europe still see reduced market liquidity impacting their investment strategies. As such, buy side and sell side traders increasingly want a choice in trading protocols to ease their liquidity seeking efforts.”
BOLT users also benefit from seamless integration with the Bloomberg Professional service and access to a deep well of pre- and post-trade information. Market participants can electronically submit up to 40 securities spanning Investment Grade, High Yield, Corporate, Municipal, U.S. Treasury and Emerging Market (EM) bonds, as well as Interest Rate Swap (IRS) derivatives. Credit Default Swaps (CDS) will be added to the suite of financial products eligible for BOLT in 2017.
For more information about Bloomberg BOLT, visit BOLT <GO> on the Bloomberg Professional service.
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Source: Bloomberg
