We recently gathered input from 16 corporate-bond liquidity providers, examining their views on liquidity, where they see opportunities for innovation and the market’s next step forward. Their key areas of planned investment—direct connectivity to clients and ways to better leverage their client network—are another sign that the market has fundamentally changed from its post-credit-crisis norm.

Mike Sobel, president, Trumid, says: “We’re thrilled to bring in investors whose expertise matches our strategic priorities. Credit market structure is evolving quickly and we’re excited to run hard at the big growth opportunities in front of us.”

Chart of MarketAxess vs. Tradeweb High Grade Volumes (13th chart on the list)

An exciting development we’ve seen in recent years is that modern bond desks are broadening their list of liquidity providers and connecting to a wider range of counterparties. This has two major effects: it means that fixed income traders are able to tailor their execution methods, and in many cases it can reduce costs by eliminating fees from intermediaries. By connecting to multiple liquidity providers, fixed income traders are able to take advantage of each counterparty’s individual strengths alongside the broad base of liquidity from larger institutions.

The rocky trading since last week’s debut continued on Monday, with Coinbase’s longer-dated 2031 tranche that pays 3.625% interest falling to as low as $95.75 cents on the dollar, before retracing some of the lost ground. 

Gensler, who testified Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee, said in prepared remarks released beforehand that he wants to “bring greater efficiency and transparency” to the trading of corporate bonds, municipal bonds and mortgage-backed securities. He offered little detail on what new rules might look like.

Faced with yields once reserved for the safest types of government debt, some managers of speculative-grade bond funds are piling into debt with rock-bottom credit ratings. Others are buying smaller, more obscure securities that carry higher yields because they can be hard to sell.

Thirty investment-grade rated borrowers priced new deals on Monday and Tuesday, the most for any two-day period since last September, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In junk bond land, 11 issuers marketed bonds, while at least six launched leveraged loan sales, according to the Bloomberg-compiled data. Taken together, the market absorbed almost 48 transactions in the first two days of the week.

Shareholders in an open-end bond fund expect (and receive in many cases) to be able to sell their shares much more easily and quickly than if they held bonds directly. When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney said, “These funds are built on a lie, which is that you can have daily liquidity, and that for assets that fundamentally aren’t liquid.”

On the broader economy, the Fed has kept its foot to the accelerator despite some of the fastest post-World War II growth the U.S. has ever seen. Second-quarter GDP numbers are out Thursday, with the Dow Jones estimate at 8.4% annualized growth for the April-to-June period. That would be the fastest pace since early 1983, not counting last year’s outsized Q3 growth as the economy reopened from the pandemic shutdown.