MarketAxess Brings Efficiency to Portfolio Trading Protocols

NEW YORK, June 19, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MarketAxess Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: MKTX), the operator of a leading electronic trading platform for fixed-income securities, and the provider of market data and post-trade services for the global fixed-income markets, today announced the development of a Portfolio Trading solution.

In response to the recent growth in portfolio trading across the fixed income market and the growth of Fixed Income ETFs, MarketAxess plans to launch an innovative Portfolio Trading solution for its over 1,500 global institutional investor and dealer firms. MarketAxess’ Portfolio Trading solution will streamline the trading experience by allowing participants to:

• Trade on both price and spread for hundreds of different bonds with flexible negotiation options;
• Submit inquiries to leading liquidity providers for improved competitive pricing;
• Connect directly to OMS providers; and
• Access award-winning market data and pricing analytics to optimize portfolio pricing and execution quality. 

Chris Concannon, President and Chief Operating Officer, commented, “Improving trading efficiency and the certainty of execution for clients is our top priority. Our Portfolio Trading protocol will help address both priorities by creating a streamlined solution for institutional investors to market and transact large, customized, fixed income portfolios that ultimately demonstrates best execution with competitive pricing and industry-leading analytics.”

The new Portfolio Trading solution integrates MarketAxess’ proprietary A.I.-powered algorithmic pricing engine, Composite+™ (CP+), throughout the trading workflow. CP+ leverages a universe of over 24,000 bonds from the public FINRA Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE) and proprietary data from the MarketAxess trading platform and Trax^®. This unique mix of transacted data from multiple sources improves pricing accuracy for complex portfolios, even with more illiquid instruments.

Portfolio Trading will initially be available for price and spread disclosed-trading and will expand into MarketAxess’ anonymous all-to-all Open Trading™ protocols, bringing further global liquidity options. Portfolio Trading is expected to launch in the Autumn of 2019.

About MarketAxess
MarketAxess operates a leading, institutional electronic trading platform delivering expanded liquidity opportunities, improved execution quality and significant cost savings across global fixed-income markets.  More than 1,500 firms - comprising the world’s leading asset managers and institutional broker-dealers - traded a record $1.7 trillion of U.S. investment-grade bonds, U.S. high yield bonds, emerging market debt, Eurobonds and other fixed income securities through MarketAxess’ patented trading technology in 2018.   MarketAxess’ award-winning Open Trading™ marketplace is regarded as the preferred all-to-all trading solution in the global credit markets, creating a unique liquidity pool for the broad range of credit market participants.  Drawing on its deep data and analytical resources, MarketAxess enables automated trading solutions and, through its Trax^® division, provides a range of pre- and post-trade services and products. 

MarketAxess is headquartered in New York and has offices in London, Amsterdam, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, São Paulo, Hong Kong and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.marketaxess.com.