A Review of The Economist Article on Corporate Bonds
April 26, 2017 \
6 Comments
Full Article: FridayNewsletter Discussion Board
Last week the Economist wrote an “article” about the future of the corporate bond market. The piece was so interesting, that this week the Friday Newsletter is presenting reviews of the Economist article from our exclusive team of market structure experts, the 10,000 Hours Team.
Comments
I was hoping a high quality publication like The Economist would dig a little deeper on theliquidity issues at hand, and the ability of the solutions to address the problem. Instead we got Groundhog Day. There usual liquidity solutions are mentioned in this article. All are valid methods to add liquidity to a marketplace but….the key question remains. Can they materially increase the area where the market has seen liquidity drop? The market is struggling with the need to increase immediate liquidity in the round lot market. Trading odd lot sizes has never been a material issue. Does anyone hear… Read more »
Few comments: -Article Quote: “The traditional way of matching buyers and sellers has been for dealers to take on the risk. They name a price, buy bonds and hold them in their inventory until a buyer emerges. This explains why personal relationships still matter so much in the bond market.” No sir/madam. This does not explain why personal relationships exist. This explains nothing. Voice trading (and not “personal relationships”) exist because these are illiquid, esoteric assets that require price discovery and transparency when, at the same time, finding this price discovery too widely adversely effects your ability to find the… Read more »
If you want to see platforms’ market share and performance over time look at the research on The DESK – https://www.fi-desk.com/focus-on-preferred-platforms-intensifies-competition/
I read The Economist in college. I’m going to my reunion soon, and I must say I read this article as if The Economist had missed all that’s happened in the subject matter or simply got it wrong, for the most part. Serious, completely non-factual falsehoods have me wondering if this is the Wall Street version of “false news”. But let’s just chalk it up to incompetence. It’s a shame the importance and of the meaning of the advent of all-to-all trading’s potential to be transformative for market structure and the definition of buy-side best-execution got caught in such an… Read more »
A pet peeve of mine is articles that present as news and facts, but are really poorly researched commercials. Make no mistake my friends, this piece by The Economist IS a commercial and it reads like the “reporter” spoke to a single, biased, source. So allow me to help set the record a little straighter than the limp fusilli that is this piece. All to All trading in corporate bonds is in no way a new concept, but all to all RFQ trading is. Bravo to MarketAxess for bringing the protocol to market. It absolutely helps trading…for below $1MM investment… Read more »
There’s a lot of anger in this week’s discussion. C’mon guys, have a little patience with these guys – they’ve only been around since 1843! Yes, yes, they have a broad and diverse reader base and yes, yes, they need to keep things at a high-enough level to deal with the aforementioned diverse reader base to understand. Ok, the corporate bond market (the credit market for readers of Friday Newsletter) has been the focus of tens of millions of dollars of VC money and countless words dedicated to describing its past and predicting its future, but these articles don’t seem… Read more »
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