Pricing for investment-grade credit below $2 million is now completely electronic, with plans to expand, said Adam Korn, global head of securities division “strats” and technology. “If you come back in a year or two, I suspect we will have automated the $2-$5 million segment of the investment grade,” Korn said in an interview. 

AllianceBernstein Holding LP has introduced a robot to execute corporate-bond trades directly with bots at dealer counterparties. The $587 billion asset manager used the system in August to complete three trades with similar digital assistants at Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Canada.

“The big theme here is a search for yield and a search for return,” said Rebecca Patterson, chief investment officer at Bessemer Trust. “As you have more and more negative yielding government bonds around the world, investors that need income are looking to the US.”

The company is considering an expansion into corporate bond trading and is expected to hire Frederic Boyer, who most recently worked for Ken Griffin’s Citadel LLC as a managing director and head of quantitative research for global credit.  

“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.