JPMorgan Boosts Its Electronic Trading Venue as Clients Look to Sell Bonds

(Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. is upgrading its electronic trading platform to make it easier for the firm to sell corporate bonds to clients, as market weakness leaves dealers across Wall Street looking to offload securities on behalf of their customers.

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The JPMorgan Liquidity Network, which the bank has been building and adding to for months, can now send requests to customers to bid on corporate bonds, according to Austin Garrison, head of North America credit trading at JPMorgan. Previously, the system only allowed for customers to ask the firm for bids.

The move has been in the works for some time, and isn’t in response to recent drops in bond prices. But it comes at a time when many investors are looking to sell debt securities, and finding buyers can be hard as the market’s size has doubled over the last decade by some measures.

“We’re trying to make sure we continue to provide best-in-class liquidity as the market structure changes and client needs become more nuanced and in some ways more complex,” Garrison said in an interview.

Changes in market structure have vexed investors and dealers alike in the corporate bond market. During the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, buyers for the securities were hard to find, with risk premiums on the Bloomberg U.S. Corporate index of high-grade credit shooting more than 2.75 percentage points higher in a matter of weeks, an eye-popping move. The Federal Reserve announced a series of extraordinary steps to support credit markets, including buying individual bonds.

Those market moves have spurred many Wall Street banks and third parties to increase investments in algorithmic credit trading technology, to improve their performance when prices move steeply. Until recent years, most credit trading took place over the phone and through instant messages.

The corporate bond market has been facing new selling pressure this year, as the Fed gets ready to boost interest rates and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made many investors more reluctant to take risk. Risk premiums on high-grade U.S. corporate bonds have widened to their highest level since late 2020, according to Bloomberg index data, and the securities have lost around 6% on a total return basis this year through Wednesday.

Muni Bonds

The JPMorgan Liquidity Network has also started automating the bank’s requests for quotes and bids on municipal bonds, which historically were done manually, Garrison said. The bank also plans to connect its European and emerging market corporate bond trading desks to the electronic platform in the first half of this year.

The platform, which has been rolled out in phases since November 2020, allows clients to electronically trade North American corporate and municipal bonds with JPMorgan as the sole dealer. That can mean cost savings on fees for clients who might otherwise trade with the bank through a third party, such as platforms like MarketAxess Holdings Inc. and Tradeweb Markets Inc. that feature multiple dealers.

JPMorgan’s platform gives clients access to the bank’s data and includes pre-and-post trade analytics and services. Another key advantage, the bank says, is that by only interacting with one bank, a client reduces the chance that their efforts to sell a bond results in word of a possible trade getting out and hurting market prices.

“Credit is extremely fragmented. You may think you’re getting a great price by asking four or five dealers for prices via a trading venue and picking the best bid or the best offer, but you’re also leaving an information footprint behind,” said Subodh Karnik, head of client intelligence marketing at research firm Coalition Greenwich. “The cost of transparency, and the cost of information leakage gets baked back in.”

“The biggest guys on the block like JPMorgan have figured out that they should have a single dealer electronic platform,” Karnik said. “Clients get to enjoy JPMorgan’s prices and JPMorgan’s access without leaking information to the market.”

JPMorgan is one of the biggest traders of corporate debt on Wall Street, helped by its position as the biggest underwriter of the debt in many markets including the U.S.

Automated Transactions

The Liquidity Network platform works with JPMorgan’s algorithmic trading technology, which can price and trade some bonds without any human input. The bank hopes that all the new technology means liquidity is improved, even in periods of market stress.

“Our algorithmic trading capabilities have been largely improved over the last several years, and they’re connected to this network,” said Pasquale Cataldi, head of JPMorgan’s Digital Markets Lab, which designed the new platform. “In general, our ability to give quotes during highly volatile periods has significantly increased, as we tap multiple sources of internal and external liquidity in real time.”

Read More: Credit Robots Are Muscling Into Junk, Emerging Markets Bonds

Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, competes with sell-side bond dealers to offer fixed-income trading, data and information to the financial services industry.

The U.S. investment-grade corporate bond market has more than doubled in size over the last decade, while the junk market has grown by about 60%. At the same time, banks often have to find buyers almost immediately for any bonds they buy, because of post-financial crisis rules make it expensive for them to hold onto securities they buy.

Those trends pressured the market in 2020, and may still be an issue. Last month, even when bond prices moved sharply, overall corporate bond trading volume was down slightly from February 2021, according to Trace data published by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

But a higher percentage of volume may be heading for electronic systems. Tradeweb posted record average daily volume for fully electronic high-grade credit trading in February, the company said.