The top five investment companies hold $264 billion in US high-yield bonds, according to a big report from Stephen Caprio and Matthew Mish at UBS. That’s equivalent to 20% of the market. The top 20 hold $605 billion, equivalent to 46%

Vanguard believes that several key improvements will help electronic trading continue to evolve in ways that are most beneficial to investors. We strongly advocate for policies and practices that (1) limit the fragmentation of trading, (2) encourage direct interaction between buyers and sellers, (3) better link trading and order-management systems, (4) provide greater price transparency, and (5) protect against information leakage.

EDMA said it will work with its members to develop collective views on regulatory developments impacting the electronic fixed-income trading sector. It has set out principles to guide its activity, which include ensuring open access and fair, transparent markets, diversity of electronic trading protocols and equivalent regulatory treatment of all electronic trading platforms.

Unfortunately, despite the abundance of these market solutions, Sales Workflow Systems have yet to transform any of the corporate bond dealers that utilize them into the efficient, synergy-capturing, riskless-principal-trading powerhouses that they want to be.

Deutsche Bank AG, UBS Group AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc are considering selling their minority stakes in Tradeweb Markets LLC, a bond and derivatives trading system, according to people familiar with the matter.

Complaints and fears about mandated transparency are warranted, but eliminating or preventing transparency also requires examination. In theory, limited transparency should encourage robust market making activity due to the commercial opportunity available in an inefficient environment. In practice, lack of transparency is the root cause of some of the largest systemic issues in unstructured OTC markets

The ICAP Sponsored Access Model (ISAM) is poised to go live, allowing asset managers to trade fixed income on the inter-dealer market for the first time, via their sell side partners. 

Mutual funds and money-market funds offered by the world’s largest asset manager could borrow up to a third of their assets in total – or up to 10 percent of assets without posting collateral – through BlackRock’s “InterFund Program.”

My greatest error was that I was so committed to altering the competitive landscape in the front-office that I did not adequately structure the firm to simultaneously attack the uncompetitive landscape in the back-office. 

The real issue is that market participants don’t have all the consolidated information at the moment they need it to make immediate decisions.  Lack of consolidated information is hurting our market.