Tradeweb introduces Trade at Close functionality for electronic portfolio trading

Tradeweb Markets Inc. (NASDAQ:TW) today announced it has introduced Trade at Close functionality for electronic portfolio trading.

U.S. and European clients of Tradeweb are now able to electronically execute portfolio trades at end-of-day prices, enabling them to more efficiently manage what are often their largest and most critical credit trades. Tradeweb began rolling out Trade at Close functionality in July 2021, with nearly $1.4 billion in trading facilitated by September month-end.

Chris Bruner, Managing Director and Head of U.S. Institutional Fixed Income at Tradeweb, said:

“As passive investment trends fuel interest in fixed income ETFs, the ability to electronically trade a portfolio of bonds at a single closing price has never been more important. Portfolio trading provides clients with surety of execution, the ability to transfer very significant risk, and protection from information leakage, and expanding its functionality further to incorporate end-of-day trading will help more of our clients digitize some of their largest trades.”

Passive funds typically trade at end-of-day prices to minimize tracking error to their underlying benchmarks. Similarly, investors rebalancing their portfolios after an inflow or outflow, or those investors seeding a new fund, will also tend to trade at the close to limit their exposure to intraday volatility. Certain active investors looking to capitalize on end-of-day dealer positions will trade opportunistically at the same time.

An electronic portfolio trading solution tailored for these market participants allows for the movement of significant flow based on reference prices, and for those clients to benefit from straight-through processing and innovations unique to Tradeweb. These include solutions like AiPrice, which provides real-time prices for nearly 25,000 corporate bonds, and Multi-Client Net Spotting, which nets hedging activity across Tradeweb clients spotting at the same time. In the first three quarters of 2021, net spotting services have saved Tradeweb clients more than $16 million.

Ted Husveth, Managing Director of U.S. Credit at Tradeweb, added:

“We’ve collaborated with our clients all the way through our design and launch of portfolio trading, and this has informed so many of our successive enhancements to the protocol, from the introduction of competitive quoting in October 2019 to trading at the close. We have a robust roadmap ahead of us, and are excited to adapt our technology further as we approach the new year.”