After complaints that trading venues are flooded with axes, the buy-side are taking it into their own hands to weed out poor performers.
“We don’t rely on axes much anymore,” Michał Pondel, fixed income and FX trader at Allianz Global Investors, told the FILS Europe audience. “We rely more on hit ratios, how much of the street price is firm, things like that.”
Benjamin Mahe, head of high-touch trading and BNP Paribas Asset Management, was also clear that axe quality was paramount.
“We don’t like people who are trying to game, we don’t like people who are putting two-sided axes out,” he said.
“People who are faking axes will be removed from the RFQ. For example, in IG credit, we decided to remove one counterparty no matter what because they had two-sided axes. They don’t even enter the first layer of our automated selection.”
MarketAxess, which shows axes on its platform, defended the tools.
While quality is the priority, Aria Pattinson-Speirs, head of Eurobonds at MarketAxess, acknowledged that “we have a bit of a flood towards quantity.”
“We agree that the market is flooded with axes. It’s difficult for dealers to keep everything as accurate as possible. But it’s also beneficial to have a large number of axes in dealer selection,” she said.
“Some platforms police [the axes they show]. What we’re working on is being very transparent in terms of quality, displaying the performance of each axe. We want to show the analytics, and then leave it up to the buy side to act on that information.”
Other buy-side traders at the conference echoed these cries for axe quality, with one panelist stating that the ecosystem needs to be cleared up “on a ground level”.
“The sell side has an axe on everything, and the buy side is getting very frustrated with that,” they observed.
The discussion comes just days after a Susquehanna survey which revealed that the buy-side does not agree on what an axe actually is.
READ MORE: Traders disagree on key FI trading definitions
Concerns about the reliability of axes have been a conference mainstay in recent years, with panellists at FIX EMEA in March and FIX Paris last year warning that they can be misleading.
READ MORE: FIX Paris: Bond axes multitude does not reflect liquidity quality
©Markets Media Europe 2026
