Trading Tech: Markit Launches Real-Time Bond Pricing

The new live bond pricing service covers more than 35,000 bonds across 40 currencies and delivers more than 250,000 pricing updates per minute.

Markit, a provider of financial information services, launched the live pricing for bonds, a streaming pricing service for investment grade and high yield corporate, sovereign and agency bonds.

Markits new live bond pricing service covers more than 35,000 bonds across 40 currencies and delivers more than 250,000 pricing updates per minute. Customers will benefit from improved pre-trade price transparency, timely intraday asset valuation calculations and superior best execution analysis.

We are extremely excited to introduce a true real-time pricing solution for the bond market. The traditional evaluator only approach is insufficient for real-time bond pricing as markets move much faster than human evaluators. With Markits live bond pricing, weve applied an innovative, hybrid approach to pricing bonds using a combination of market data, evaluator expertise and a machine driven algorithm. This is truly the next generation of fixed income pricing — providing evaluator expertise without the associated latency, said Kiet Tran, global head of Fixed Income Pricing at Markit.

Markits new live pricing is generated through a combination of intraday prices extracted from real-time pricing contributions from major market makers, trade colour and data captured by our real-time parsing technology. Evaluator audits safeguard accuracy and reliability while avoiding the characteristic delays.

The fixed income pricing service provides independent pricing, transparency and liquidity data for fixed income instruments to support risk management, price verification, compliance and trading workflows. The service combines a team of over 100 fixed income experts with Markit’s market quotes and transaction data aggregation capabilities to generate a best in class pricing solution.