“The ECB has become a big play-maker in the distortion of competition on the capital markets for sovereign bonds and corporate bonds and has in this way suspended the system of undistorted competition which is mandated in the treaties,” Markus Kerber, a lawyer for some of the claimants, told a 15-judge panel.

Earlier this month, trueEx, an independent exchange for interest rate swaps (“IRS”), filed a lawsuit against eleven banks, including all the major swaps dealers, for “an ongoing conspiracy … to boycott trueEX in order to undermine increased competition in the IRS market

Last year we focused on aggregating different pre-trade data to provide our traders with deeper transparency on the fixed income markets and on improving post-trade cost analysis. This year we are working on combining pre-trade and post-trade data to help our trading team gather more insight through data science with a goal of improving execution.

OpenDoor Securities, LLC (“OpenDoor”), the first all-to-all marketplace for illiquid US Treasuries, has named Marie Patton as Chief Administrative Officer and Co-Head of Sales, and Lauren McFall Gardner as Managing Director and Co-Head of Sales.

The inability to process pricing data for corporate bonds is preventing buy-side traders from finding real opportunities to trade. Data is readily available; broker-dealers, specialists data aggregators, TRACE, Bloomberg data and benchmark providers all give guidance on where a price may be. In fact there is too much of it. The quality of that information is highly variable, the volume provided by dealers is increasing, and the absence of a standard format makes it hard to compare. 

Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE:ICE), a leading operator of global exchanges and clearing houses and provider of data and listings services, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire TMC Bonds LLC for $685 million in cash.

The Vatican said that in certain areas of the derivatives markets there’s an “ethical void which becomes more serious as these products are negotiated on the so-called markets with less regulation (over the counter) and are exposed more to the markets regulated by chance, if not by fraud, and thus take away vital life-lines and investments to the real economy.”

MarketAxess has granted Pimco a special arrangement that allows the bond giant to limit the information it shares on the electronic trading platform and take advantage of any off-market prices, three sources with knowledge of the matter told IFR.

The European Securities and Markets Authority said that just 220 bonds are liquid enough to have to meet the pre- and post-trade requirements in new European Union regulations.

The concern is that as rates rise it will cost companies more to roll over their obligations, and if earnings begin to slump as economic growth slows, that could blow out leverage ratios and lead to credit-rating cuts.