By December, one in every three transactions was taking place on an electronic platform, according to data from Greenwich Associates. This momentum continued last month, with volumes of digital trading in investment-grade and high-yield bonds rising 3% and 7% year-on-year, respectively. Analysts and traders expect this shift to continue.
The corporate bond market has been a slow adopter of technology compared with currency or stock markets, which are now mostly transacted electronically. A typical public company will have a single equity security but might have multiple types of bonds, with each individual debt instrument trading far less frequently. This makes standardising trading harder. That had started to change before the pandemic struck. Electronic trading made inroads with the growth of platforms like MarketAxess and Tradeweb — where investors can electronically request prices for bonds from certain dealers, or trade anonymously with the wider market at prices streamed on to
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