Exclusive: Quinn and Sobel discuss Trumid’s new portfolio trading protocol

Dan Barnes
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Trumid, the fixed income electronic trading platform, has launched a portfolio trading protocol. Designed to simplify and extend electronic portfolio trading for institutional clients and dealers, Trumid Portfolio Trading (PT) is the newest addition to Trumid’s ecosystem of protocols and trading solutions — delivering multiple workflows to traders in a single unified application.

Trumid began rolling out its new PT solution to clients in late 2022. The first release focused on an  integrated electronic solution for clients to submit, evaluate, negotiate, and execute portfolio trades as efficiently as possible, with a “clean and simple” user interface.

Jason Quinn, chief product officer of Trumid.

“We’ve seen some trades go through around US$2-4 million, and others that are upwards of a half a billion dollars,” says Jason Quinn, chief product officer of Trumid. “The average line item count is somewhere between 75-100 line items. We’re seeing a trend towards more portfolio trades, perhaps smaller size per line item in some cases, and a large line item count. We built the system to handle up to 3000 line items, which is quite a bit more than anyone else out there. That’s a testament to the technology, our agile approach and for the system to be flexible enough to handle almost every case.”

Mike Sobel, co-CEO and president of Trumid.

“The intuitive nature of the UI, which we’ve invested heavily in, is very different than it was just a few years ago,” says Mike Sobel, co-CEO and president of Trumid. “A few years ago, we probably had the coolest, nicest-looking most performing UI, but we continue to invest in it specifically to deliver new protocols. You can feel the difference between the modern approach and something that is kind of cobbled together over decades. The outcome is that clients are willing to try new ways of trading, have a positive experience and keep coming back.”

Designed and built in collaboration with network participants, Trumid PT includes:

  • Desk collaboration tools to enable sell-side traders at the same dealer to collaborate in real-time on inquiries.
  • Access to Trumid’s Fair Value Model Price (FVMP). Trumid’s proprietary real time bond pricing service is embedded in the workflow, covering approximately 20,000 USD-denominated corporate bonds.
  • List processing for up to 3,000 line items. Large lists can be efficiently managed through the platform with rapid pricing and post-trade delivery. Analytics for portfolio trades with 3,000 line items across eight dealers in competition can be recalculated in under one second.
  • Flexible negotiation features to allow buy-side clients to fully negotiate within the application.
  • Straight-through processing to order management system (OMS) providers and proprietary systems.

“From the very beginning, our vision has been to establish an ecosystem where clients don’t need to switch between platforms, depending on the trade they’re trying to execute,” says Quinn. “Portfolio trading for us represents the first foray into list-based protocols. We felt our core competencies played nicely to getting a valuable workflow out to our client base, given our market expertise, the complexity of PT in general, and how we excel at taking complex interactions and simplifying them for use on a platform like ours.”

Trumid Portfolio Trading is integrated with Trumid’s dealer-to-client protocol, Attributed Trading (AT), offering a data-supplemented approach to portfolio trading. Forty four dealers and algorithmic liquidity providers stream actionable market data on more than 13,000 CUSIPs daily into AT, all of which can be leveraged within the portfolio trading protocol.

“Trumid PT is quickly gaining momentum as clients demonstrate their trust in us by embedding our new protocol in their daily workflow,” says Sobel. “Week after week we’re seeing more users of Trumid PT, with larger lists by overall size and number of line items, and executions flowing smoothly. Trumid’s clients continue to value our fast and intuitive UI and the unique integration between our protocols.”

“I’m most excited about the amount of feedback we’re getting from the clients that are using it, and there are more and more buy-side clients trying it every day,” Quinn says. “We have 16 dealers that are able to respond to PT, they’re all fully integrated, more dealers will continue to get at it. We understand the PT market, we’re getting feedback and more clients using the workflow. We’re implementing the best of that feedback really quickly, allowing us to partner a lot of our clients in helping PT to evolve. We’ll keep adding functionality, adding more data for the analysis to help evaluate which dealer to trade with.”

He notes the firm has streamlined what was considered a complex workflow for clients with a pipeline of features and functionality to be added.

“This month, we deployed multiple platform-wide net spotting sessions across all our trading protocols, including Trumid PT,” he adds. “Clients can choose when and how to spot with enhanced access to our competitive rates liquidity and rapid net hedging.”

Trumid continues to expand its rates automation tools, in addition to spotting trades at the time of execution, and at 4 pm ET, Trumid users can also elect to spot trades at 11 am, 3 pm, and 4:30 pm ET.

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