Electronic trading in US credit showed little movement between 2024 and 2025, hovering just below 50% of investment grade (IG) volumes and remaining at 32% of the high yield (HY) market according to a recent Coalition Greenwich report.
Notional volumes saw a more interesting year. In IG credit, e-trading was up 11% to US$20.8 billion. In HY, an 18% increase to US$3.9 billion was recorded.
Although e-trading’s momentum was not particularly energetic in 2025, Coalition Greenwich predicts that growth will be revitalised.
“E-trading has taken a stair-step approach to growth over the past decade: a few years of growth, then a few years flat, and then more growth. The IG e-trading percentage stayed nearly flat from 2015–2017 and then again between 2019–2020, both followed by strong upticks,” report authors Kevin McPartland, head of research for market structure and technology, and Neha Jain.
“Markets never go backwards in the long run. Volumes keep going up. Efficiency increases. Technology gets better and faster. We’ve seen that happen in corporate bonds for nearly two decades. It will keep happening.”
Overall, average daily notional volumes were up 11% over the year, reaching US$51 billion, and average trade sizes rose by 8.8% to US$398 thousand. The average daily trade count was up 1.9% to 128,141.
In the dealer space, MarketAxess has retained its dominance in HY markets, but by a lesser margin year-on-year. It lost the IG crown to Tradeweb, which overtook MarketAxess despite losing overall market share.
READ MORE: MarketAxess and Tradeweb beat TRACE in December slowdown
Also a success story in 2025 was portfolio trading, which had been growing continuously – albeit at a slower pace – since 2022.
READ MORE: Portfolio trading proves transformational, but controversial
The proportion of trades executed via disclosed request-for-quote fell once again, down to 38.6% for the year.
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