ICE to Buy Virtu’s Bondpoint for $400MM – The Trade
October 27, 2017 \
2 Comments
Full Article: The Trade
ICE has agreed to buy Virtu Financial’s fixed income trading venue BondPoint in a deal worth $400 million. The purchase will enable ICE to bolster its fixed income capabilities within its data and technology structure as it continues to expand into the asset class.
Comments
The game continues to evolve. I thought it was pretty interesting that the announcement came right before the MKTX earnings announcement and call. It certainly created a diversion on the call, and generated some interesting question and response, you certainly wouldn’t have thought MKTX bid on them (unconfirmed press). From a structural perspective, KBP is the best credit ATS fit for an exchange. Minimal front end presence, lowest cost structure that is majority focused on execution. However, its a microlot ATS trying to grow into bigger size. I am guessing the average trade size is 50m, so ICE paid a… Read more »
While there are obviously a lot of smart people out there and it sounds like many of them were bidding for Knight Bondpoint, I don’t understand how they get to that valuation. It seems people are using MKTX as the comparison but MKTX is in a unique position basically owning the NA credit space for over 10 years now watching TradeWeb and Bloomberg trip all over themselves multiple times in an effort to compete with them. To be fair, TradeWeb has done and awesome job in virtually every other FI asset class they trade, most with dominant market share I… Read more »
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