“At Elefant, we’ve replaced traders with algorithms and replaced salespeople with APIs,” said Raazi, referring to the code that allows computers to interact with servers. “Software-based pricing is here.”

“We should recognize what prices and price movements in the corporate market are telling us. For example, on a total-return basis, the upside has become more limited while the downside has not improved.”

Sales of investment-grade corporate bonds came to $54B in the U.S. through Wednesday, putting the week on track to be the busiest ever for corporate bond deals, with at least $70B  more projected for the rest of the month, Bloomberg reports.

A once-unthinkable collapse in global bond yields is forcing pension funds to buy bonds that offer negative returns –putting the financial security of future retirees in jeopardy.  

It finds evidence that the rule has increased the cost of liquidity provided by firms it covers, but not decreased the firms’ exposure to liquidity risk. 

The quantity of information captured each day at the asset manager’s fixed-income unit has tripled in the last two years to 92 terabytes — or 92 trillion bytes. That includes active inventory, trade data, 4 million messages and direct price feeds. By comparison, scientists using the Hubble telescope to
understand the origins of the universe suck in 10 terabytes a year.

Now our investors with the introduction of live markets, clients will be able to place orders in a market that is available to all and that’s a critical function that has been missing from the bond market. It’s a function that we take for granted in other markets, but the future is market where clients can rest orders and obviously the equity market globally where clients can rest orders, we are building a place for clients to rest order side by side with dealers to stream price to clients.

When the history of the past decade of ultra-easy monetary policy by the world’s major central banks is written, there will be no shortage of candidates to illustrate how seriously those central banks distorted the world’s credit markets. 

In credit, systematic traders sort corporate obligations into buckets called carry, value, momentum and size to analyze spreads relative to credit risk, leverage, the size of the issuer and ease of trading. Factor devotees say their volatility-adjusted approach sidesteps yield-chasing and duration risk. And after back-testing, JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimates long-only factors can best the market over the long haul.  

“What we would do is we would connect with five to six of the liquidity sources, with broker dealers, and then it’s important to partner with firms like [Tradeweb] and MarketAxess to aggregate the next hundred liquidity providers. That liquidity is important to us,” she said.