Fixed Income Trading

Stage, monitor, trade and allocate

Bloomberg’s fixed income trading platform and complete execution management solution provide liquidity, trading functionality and straight-through processing for all fixed income securities, derivatives and futures.

One portal, multiple dealers

FIT, Bloomberg’s fixed income trading platform, links all available fixed income electronic trading products into one portal and provides multi-dealer, executable composite pricing, so you can stage, monitor, trade and allocate trades through a single function on the Bloomberg Terminal. You can also trade with FIT from your TSOX blotter.

The FIT market monitor allows you to watch the current bid and ask prices for a type of security within your chosen market, so you can follow market movements and identify the rates at which you want to trade. You can simply click a price or enable a multi-leg deal to submit a trade ticket to your chosen dealers.

Bloomberg BOLT is list trading platform that allows you to access a deep pool of liquidity for investment grade, high yield, emerging markets (EM), credit default swaps (CDS), interest rate swaps (IRS) and municipal bonds.

Bloomberg multilateral trading facility, BMTF, is a robust trading platform for trading cash bonds, IRS, CDS, Repos, ETFs, listed options and FX derivatives. Bloomberg has examined and built upon its existing end-to-end trading workflows to offer an efficient trading platform and ensure a seamless transition into the MiFID II regulatory environment.

Bloomberg SEF is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), with participants actively trading Permitted Transactions in CDS, IRS, FX and commodity derivatives.

How we help our clients

Fixed income staging blotter

Bloomberg’s Fixed Income and Derivatives Execution Management System (TSOX) allows liquidity takers to route and execute orders into Bloomberg’s FIT trading platform, as well as other supported venues, and manage incoming orders in order to quickly and efficiently manage their trading activities.

Orders can be staged directly from your order management system (OMS), or uploaded from Microsoft Excel, and executed and allocated in one click. When orders are filled your OMS is updated automatically. Voice matching and IB trading allows orders to be staged in TSOX that were not traded electronically (i.e., over the phone or instant message), and recorded for compliance and reporting.

Automation as your competitive advantage

Bloomberg’s fixed income platform, paired with our trade automation tools, enables you to boost your productivity, increasing the number of orders you can manage during the daily trading window. This efficient workflow enables the desk to break down incoming order flow from portfolio managers into discrete ‘high touch’ and ‘low touch’ functions. Bloomberg’s technology augments your role by helping you automate small trades and administrative tasks, freeing time to focus more on strategic activities.

Bloomberg Rule Builder (RBLD) enables fixed income execution traders to create rules that facilitate fully automated trading on Bloomberg venues through TSOX. Rule Builder can take an order and convert it to a trade in just over one second — with zero mouse clicks. The automation tool uses real-time and historical performance data systematically to decide which dealers receive your RFQ, helping to ensure your best execution policy is adhered to.

Bloomberg supports the automation of government and credit fixed income bond execution, as well as credit and interest rate swaps. Our Direct Order Routing (DOR) solution enables you to integrate your in-house Smart Order Router (SOR) with Bloomberg’s liquidity. DOR replicates the RFQ and Order protocols on our venues through the FIX interface, enabling traders to achieve new levels of operational efficiency, particularly for low-touch orders.

How we help our clients

Granular control of fixed income trading

Bloomberg’s new Legal Entity Identifier Admin (LEIA) provides rule-based, fixed income trading controls for price takers and makers on Bloomberg’s electronic trading platforms. LEIA operates at the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) level, enabling the creation of separate trading controls profiles for each individual LEI used for trading.

A high level of granularity enables users to define counterparties on an LEI basis, making it possible to precisely define with which entities within a large firm trading is permitted. Rules can be created and configured on an allocation account basis, delivering a higher degree of control while increasing your efficiency and reducing risk across the desk.

How we help our clients

Total return swaps on Bloomberg Fixed Income Indices

The recent launch and trading of standardized TRS contracts on the Bloomberg Fixed Income Indices (BTRS) enables investors to gain synthetic exposure to cash bonds and, specifically, the market leading fixed income benchmark.

Total Return Swaps (TRS) provide an alternative vehicle to trading the underlying index of cash securities, to simplify the transaction and avoid the infrastructure and maintenance associated with cash positions. TRS are usually structured with a total return leg (on the underlying index) versus the funding leg (usually Libor or other funding benchmarks).

TRS on Bloomberg’s market leading indices are designed to assist traditional PMs in matching benchmark returns or to hedge risk exposure using derivative trades. Bloomberg dealer pages, advanced analytics in pricing and in risk, and electronic trading platforms will help facilitate flow/liquidity in this instrument.

Key benefits of BTRS contracts include:

• Standardization of the deal structure, quoting convention and pricing
• Quarterly maturing contracts expire at the end of IMM months (March, June, September, December) to enhance liquidity
• The ability to collapse trades. e.g., monthly deal cash flows and resets will match due to the standardized nature of the contract
• End-of-month resets and payments consistent with portfolio management performance practices on the corresponding cash product portfolio
• Transparency and pricing of the underlying indices provided by Bloomberg
• Funding legs based on one-month Libor “flat”
• Well positioned to become clearing-eligible

For more information, please contact btrs1@bloomberg.net