The audience at FILS USA got an in-depth insight into optimising front office technology on Thursday, with a detailed analysis of how desktop interoperability tools can be used to support traders, including their role…
Fixed income trading is well beyond the request for quote (RFQ)-only era, i.e. when the only way for a trader to find the other side of a transaction was by canvassing brokers. But while…
Treasury launches new effort to improve resilience of its market
The US Department of the Treasury, in consultation with the Inter-Agency Working Group on Treasury Market Surveillance (IAWG), has taken the next step in its…
As fixed income market participants eye the threat of a further back-up in yields, liquidity sourcing is being reassessed.
While technology has greatly advanced the capabilities of the trading desk, when bond prices swoon, the…
Getting the next generation of traders to have the right skills and capabilities, without losing the existing market knowledge, requires traders to be multi-faceted, the audience at FILS USA 2022 heard on Thursday.
“It's completely…
The turbulence in fixed income markets over the past six months likely will continue through the second half of 2022, according to Seth Bernstein, President and CEO of AllianceBernstein.
“The Fed has never engineered a…
European including of government bonds within its consolidated tape, and a new joint venture amongst platform giants Bloomberg, MarketAxess and Tradeweb, could allow Europe to leapfrog the US in terms of market transparency. The…
The rollout of FDC3 as a standard to support desktop interoperability between different applications has generated considerable interest in the trading community.
Dwayne Middleton, global head of fixed income trading at T Rowe Price says,…
Every trader attending FILS will be keeping an eye on the markets, as bid-ask spreads continue to tick upwards and volumes remain choppy.
Looking at corporate bond trading volumes over the past two weeks, data…
The buzz at FILS this year reflects the three-year hiatus from in-person events – and the amount of change that has occurred since then.
Discussion between buy-side traders on the Buy-Side Only Innovation Day…
Reaching out into the market to find the other side of a trade is contingent upon the right approach, be that a particular trading protocol or the best pre-trade selection of a specific counterparty.
The…
The Fixed Income Leaders’ Summit (FILS) USA will this year begin after a period of difficult liquidity in bond markets.
MarketAxess data showed trading volumes halve in May for both US and European investment grade…
Bloomberg, MarketAxess and Tradeweb Markets today jointly issued the following statement:
“We are pleased to announce an initiative to jointly explore the delivery of a consolidated tape for fixed income instruments in the European Union,…
This page is dedicated to reports from The Fixed Income Leaders Summit, Nashville, 22-24 June, 2022. More content will follow from Wednesday 29th June onwards. Sessions on the 22nd June, the Buyside Evaluation day, will not be reported.
While every attempt is made to record delegates accurately and obtain quote approval prior to publishing if there are any inaccuracies please contact Dan Barnes.
Colm Murtagh, Head of U.S. Institutional Rates, Tradeweb.
Dollar Swaps Markets Bid Farewell to LIBOR.
In July, it was linear swaps. In November, non-linear. And next week, on December 13, the further expansion of RFR First in the cross-currency swaps market. The end of LIBOR, and more tellingly, the availability of significant liquidity in an alternative risk-free rate through SOFR, is arriving.
The beginning of the end is, as scripted, somewhat drawn out: the milestone dates so far only truly apply to the (albeit vast) dealer-to-dealer market, and the one-day, one-month, six-month and one-year USD LIBOR rates will finally cease publication in June 2023.
But with the discontinuation of LIBOR for Sterling, Swiss Franc and Japanese Yen markets from January 1, 2022, and the widespread understanding that there will be no new Dollar LIBOR risk come New Year’s Eve, the institutional market’s transition to SOFR – helped in no small part by the strenuous efforts of united regulators – is not without significant momentum.
In fact, by almost every measure we consider today, the case for switching to SOFR has never been more compelling.
First, it’s worth noting that SOFR trading on Tradeweb is hovering between a quarter and third of all new risk:
Source: TW SEF, % of Delta, excluding basis and inflation swaps
Around 85% of our most active clients are now using SOFR, and just under two-thirds of all clients have done a SOFR-based trade.
Across our platforms, our functionality has been rebuilt to serve a SOFR market, and we have already executed more than $1.3tn as our clients globally have transitioned away from LIBOR.
An instructive example for the dollar swaps market is that of sterling swaps, where the similar transition from Sterling LIBOR to SONIA the sterling RFR. The FCA and Bank of England enacted SONIA First in October 2020 for D2D markets and a target of end of Q1 2021 for D2C markets to shift. As 2021 draws to a close, it looks that the entire market will have shifted completely to SONIA by the end of the year. Regional differences notwithstanding – SONIA, as an example has been liquid for more than ten years – the SONIA example makes it clear: once liquidity in the new RFR is established, the market transitions rather quickly.
Source: Tradeweb, % of Delta
Source: Tradeweb, % of Delta
In the same vein, Bid Offer Spreads (BOS) which reflect the implied cost of liquidity for market participants, have also improved. As my colleague Jonathan Rick discussed in more detail here, we’ve started to see SOFR median BOS improve compared to LIBOR spreads over the course of this year, and particularly in response to SOFR First milestone demarcations.
It’s also worth looking again at rate dispersion as a gauge of market confidence in SOFR pricing. In more liquid and transparent markets, bids and offers typically hover tightly around a market midpoint. There’s usually common agreement, with slight variations, to what the “fair” price is for a given asset.
More dispersion amongst quoted prices suggests the market might be less liquid, and less certain of a common, prevailing price for an asset. Vice versa, tighter dispersion tends to suggest a more liquid, robust common price.
Since July’s SOFR First milestone for linear swaps, you can see a dramatic reduction in the amount of variance of SOFR rates, so much so that SOFR dispersion rates are now roughly in line with those of LIBOR.
Yet another sign of a maturing market is the nascent development of cross-currency swaps liquidity. We understand from our clients that dealer-to-dealer markets are transitioning smoothly to transacting cross-currency basis swaps, and this week, we announced the first ESTR-SOFR transaction had taken place on our platform. In offering cross-currency swaps for the new RFRs across our platforms, our clients have the option of moving to the new floating rate options in this space.
Collectively, the signals we’re picking up point to much the same thing: with less than three full weeks of trading left in 2021, the time is now for dollar swaps market participants to start the big switch (if they haven’t already done so).
By every measure: whether it’s system readiness, or far tighter BOS, or the availability of comprehensive SOFR trading tools and systems, or the success of SONIA and other such rates in other vital global markets, the market is standing ready to facilitate the conversion. It’s time to get this done.
Related Content from Tradeweb:
The Story SOFR: Institutional Adoption of New RFRsTen Days Later: Some SOFR First ObservationsTOP OF PAGE