ICAP Unveils CrossTrade: A Solution on its New Buy Side Portal (TrueQuote) – Automated Trader
March 10, 2016 \
7 Comments
Full Article: AutomatedTrader
Working in partnership with fixed-income data provider, Interactive Data, CrossTrade is a workflow efficiency tool which enables buy side customers to execute cross trades at an independently determined mid-price.
Comments
Icap Global Broking? I am surprised that it is this part of the business (the Tullett JV part) that is initiating Icap’s first real foray into the AM side of the Buyside crossing firmly into a space that its traditional dealer customer base has implicitly or explicitly shown as off limits. Is Icap (and other IDBs hooking up to EMSs) finally facing TW and Bloomberg? Good move? Yes.
Nice choice of picture….
So ICAP is now describing itself as a ‘provider of post trade mitigation and information services’, and in the next breath ICAP announces it’s launch of a trading platform for the buy-side utilizing someone else’s information services! Curiouser and curiouser cried Alice. On the face of it there is little interesting in yet another buy-side only platform. Is the magic twist here the independent benchmark evaluation as a guideline for participants? Would such a twist have guaranteed BondCube success? I would be interested to here Paul Reynold’s thoughts. Ditto for the Aladdin trading platform finally merged into MarketAxess. I can… Read more »
I’m not sure if there’s enough information here to opine on, but since ICAP left a lot to the imagination on their tightly controlled press release, it’s open season. It seems odd that the announcement of a new offering creating value for the broader market would leave out critically important information about what the offering actually does and what the relationship with Interactive Data really means. With the limited amount of information ICAP has made available, it’s difficult to understand exactly what it is they are releasing. TrueQuote was a platform developed by Chris Edmonds when he was at ICAP… Read more »
The IDC pricing piece is the most interesting for me. At what point are dealers going to stop giving away one of their biggest assets (their data) for free to firms whose only intention is to dis-intermediate them? ICAP crossing mechanism will be another tool in the tool kit of the Buy-Side execution trader but unless a large AM decides to back the platform by supplying significant liquidity (often times at a loss) I do not see how it changes the status quo. And I would wonder how performing that role would look under the microscope of Best Ex /… Read more »
Attachment I am late to the party, looks like all I can do is nod and expand a little the following points. -Is an independent benchmark enough to get buyside to trade? How much transparency does IDC give into their methodology, and how does using these benchmarks tie into fiduciary responsibility vs. market quotes? -How much more can the dealers take of watching data vendors collect their quote data without asking, and make a fortune selling it back to them and others? Then continue to watch platforms they support with transaction fees use both the data and their fees to… Read more »
Let me get this straight, after building a successful business helping dealers hedge risk and price liquidity, your strategy is to now partner with a vendor of an “independently determined” pricing service to help buy side clients trade away from your dealer clients?……Et tu Brute?…..Et tu? I agree Iceman, the most interesting thing about this deal is the source of the mid price date itself. But Ice, the dealers aren’t “giving away” this information, it is has been STOLEN without permission for years. “Derived, composite pricing” for corporate bonds has to come from somewhere right? It comes from dealer quotes… Read more »
I don’t really know what to say since all it tells me is that ICAP is launching a new product, CrossTrade, within its new buyside portal, TrueQuote, that is meant to be “a workflow efficiency tool which enables buy side customers to execute cross trades at an independently determined mid-price”. What is the workflow? Does it really provide efficiency and if so, how? What is the trading protcol one must utilize to execute a trade? And what makes ICAP think that people will execute at the IDC calculated mid-price? This idea that if you put out a ‘mid price’ it… Read more »
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