Tradeweb Markets, a global operator of electronic marketplaces for rates, credit, equities and money markets, has announced an expansion of portfolio trading functionality for corporate bonds, enhancing access to competitive liquidity globally.

Tradeweb aims to improve the execution efficiency of portfolio trading by allowing institutions to package multiple bonds into a single basket, negotiate a portfolio level price with liquidity providers including banks and principal trading firms, and execute in a single transaction. Tradeweb says it has facilitated a total US$21bn year to date, with single trades as large as US$1bn in notional value. 

The new Tradeweb functionality allows institutional clients to submit a portfolio trade to multiple liquidity providers simultaneously. Clients choose the number of liquidity providers for each trade, which allows them to balance the potential for price improvement and limiting information leakage. In addition, clients can include both buy and sell orders for individual bonds within the same portfolio trade, which should make the protocol more flexible when handling various types of fund flows and managing transition trades. In the coming weeks, Tradeweb will extend the availability of the portfolio trading protocol to its institutional marketplace in Europe.

“Portfolio trading is fast becoming a vital new liquidity source for institutional clients seeking to trade large, complex baskets efficiently,” said Chris Bruner, head of US Credit at Tradeweb. “Our expansion into competitive portfolio trading further enhances the opportunities to achieve best execution, and by accommodating both bids and offers and displaying real-time risk and reference pricing, our clients have more power to transfer large and diverse risk in a single transaction.”

Tradeweb pricing and spread analytics are powered by Ai-Price, which delivers real-time reference pricing for more than 18,000 corporate bonds. Post-trade, portfolio trades benefit from net-spotting, a service that compresses interest rate risk through seamless hedging on Tradeweb’s US Treasury marketplace, providing clients with the opportunity to reduce their transaction costs.