Thomson Financial has launched an aggregation service to establish a consolidated pool of liquidity in fixed income markets for discovery of prices and trading partners.
“AutEx FI will not disintermediate the relationship between institutions and broker/dealers,” emphasises Robert Moitoso, Thomson Financial’s sales & trading group vice president. “Rather, AutEx FI improves upon these relationships, and the pre-trade decisions that are made as a result.”
The AutEx FI service is a real time network for aggregating subject offerings (indications to purchase or sell securities originated by institutions, broker/dealers, regional dealers, ECNs) into a centralised database, providing liquidity seekers convenient access to one consolidated screen for viewing these pre-trade messages without revealing their identity.
The platform is designed only for secondary trading, otherwise known as subject offerings. Instruments supported by AutEx FI include corporate bonds (investment grade and high yield), municipals, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities.
Tools built into AutEx FI automate the screening and intelligent filtering of these subject offerings, allowing buy-side portfolio managers and traders to quickly identify the most appropriate trading partners. Once offering selections have been made, the two sides must negotiate a trade directly by telephone. Users can query the AutEx FI database for archived information on a particular bond issue, and related stored messages.
A base message includes information on the trade side (buy/sell), size of offering (subject, not firm, so seller isn’t exposed posting large positions, a common drawback with ECNs), price and comments. AutEx FI e-mail, or “A-mail”, enables the exchange of expanded text messages, including the ability to send a subject offering to an e-mail address outside the AutEx community.
The service also offers Axes, a workflow solution that permits traders to automatically submit inventory lists to their firm’s sales desk for determining subject offerings.
Interfaces between AutEx FI and a variety of order routing mechanisms such as Oneva Trade FI, Thomson Financial’s own fixed income OMS for the buy-side, are in the pipeline, says the company.