Electronic US Treasuries (UST) trading venue, LiquidityEdge, experienced record trading volumes during February 2019.
On February 28, participants traded over USD 31 billion (single count) across both on-the-runs and off-the-runs. It also experienced a record week last month, with USD 101 billion traded between 21-28 February.
The surge in activity was due to the treasury auctions, calendar rolls and the record number of unique participants benefiting from the directed, disclosed model championed by LiquidityEdge. The flexibility in its structure allows clients to choose between one-to-one or many-to-many models, facilitating a combination of anonymous and/or disclosed streaming executable prices creating a bespoke order book for each participant.
This follows on from its record month in January, where it recorded average daily volumes of USD 16 billion, representing a rise of 250 per cent from 2018. A recent Greenwich report referenced LiquidityEdge’s rapid growth and linked it to the rising buy-side interest in aggregating and trading via direct pricing streams.
LiquidityEdge is the first US Treasury venue to genuinely challenge the existing market structure that resides between bifurcated D2D and D2C, taking market share from both the traditional interdealer exchanges and RFQ platforms. Since launch, over 100 clients have joined the system, with end users including primary dealers, regional dealers, asset managers and hedge funds.
The company was founded in 2015 by Wall Street veteran David E Rutter, who also set up enterprise blockchain firm, R3.
Nichola Hunter (pictured), CEO of LiquidityEdge, says: “This trading data demonstrates that we are successfully challenging market structure and bringing about change in the largest global fixed income market for the benefit of participants. We expect our market share to continue to grow based on our deep customer pipeline and number of clients currently integrating into the platform.”
