For buy-side institutions that are formulating a price-making strategy in corporate bonds, a full examination of these key questions can serve as a guide that helps you optimize the benefits of price-making while avoiding the pitfalls.

The report found that Bloomberg accounted for 33.40% of market share as a result of growth in its data feed and other non-terminal business. At the same time, terminal counts shrank for only the second time in company history.

There’s something a bit creepy about this story, which is not so much about a hedge fund that discovered it would lose money if it was forced to sell a bunch of bonds all at once — though that is true — as it is about a hedge fund that looked into where it could sell bonds and found out that everyone’s whole concept of fair value was completely wrong.

The market seems to broadly agree that innovation is the best way to resolve the problems presented by these pressures and their impact on profitability. As demonstrated by the small number of established utilities or successful fintech start-ups, however, this often is more difficult than it looks.

According to a recent report from Greenwich Associates, institutions are allocating their increasingly scarce resources to fixed income pursuits and technology

Behemoth investment firms, from Fidelity to Vanguard to BlackRock, are locked in fierce competition to attract assets, even if that means dropping their fees closer to zero. The result has been increasing strain, borne in large part by asset-management employees, who are being laid off or paid less.

As I’ve said more times than I care to remember, the problem with all of this is that when you stop using something, it invariably falls into disrepair. That disrepair, combined with the absence of banks willing to lend their balance sheet in a pinch, means there’s no liquidity for the assets that underpin these HY ETFs

The aim is to become “the industrywide operating layer,” Mazy Dar said. Right now, OpenFin is typically delivered to a desktop together with an application that runs on it. The hope is that, in time, OpenFin will be on the desktop independent of any application, becoming a kind of finance application ecosystem of its own.

Platforms and technology providers are increasingly focusing on identifying and matching firm orders(rather than quotes) and connecting all market participants (including buy-side to buy-side). “Information Networks” are developing where the emphasis is on identifying pools of liquidity rather than trying to create liquidity.

Nasdaq has unveiled a radical overhaul to its under-performing fixed-income trading business, taking a $578m charge to end its eSpeed brand name and close its London futures venue. The US exchanges operator said that the impairment charge was because of a decline in operating performance and “a strategic change in the direction of our fixed-income business”.