Joeri Wouters has been named product development manager within the AiEx and workflow solutions team of market operator Tradeweb, after 15 years as a buy side fixed income trader at KBC Asset Management.
At KBC AM, Wouters was key to the asset manager’s development of automated trading initially in rates and then in credit. In developing this functionality, he worked closely with the Tradeweb team, including Charlie Campbell-Johnston, managing director for AiEX and Workflow Solutions at Tradeweb.
“We’re very excited to welcome Joeri to our team and look forward to working closely with him to further enhance our award-winning suite of AiEX capabilities. His deep expertise in fixed income trading will help us take automated execution to the next evolutionary stage,” says Campbell-Johnston.
Separately, Tradeweb has introduced ‘trade-at-close’ functionality for electronic portfolio trading.
US and European clients of Tradeweb should now be able to electronically execute portfolio trades at end-of-day prices, enabling them to more manage what are often their largest and most critical credit trades. Tradeweb began rolling out Trade at Close functionality in July 2021, with nearly US$1.4 billion in trading reportedly facilitated by September month-end.
Chris Bruner, managing director and head of US Institutional Fixed Income at Tradeweb, said, “As passive investment trends fuel interest in fixed income ETFs, the ability to electronically trade a portfolio of bonds at a single closing price has never been more important. Portfolio trading provides clients with surety of execution, the ability to transfer very significant risk, and protection from information leakage, and expanding its functionality further to incorporate end-of-day trading will help more of our clients digitize some of their largest trades.”
Passive funds typically trade at end-of-day prices to minimise tracking error to their underlying benchmarks. Similarly, investors rebalancing their portfolios after an inflow or outflow, or those investors seeding a new fund, will also tend to trade at the close to limit their exposure to intraday volatility. Certain active investors looking to capitalise on end-of-day dealer positions will trade opportunistically at the same time.
An electronic portfolio trading solution tailored for these market participants could allow for the movement of significant flow based on reference prices, and for those clients to benefit from straight-through processing and Tradeweb-specific services. These include solutions like AiPrice, which provides real-time prices for nearly 25,000 corporate bonds, and Multi-Client Net Spotting, which nets hedging activity across Tradeweb clients spotting at the same time. In the first three quarters of 2021, net spotting services reportedly saved Tradeweb clients more than US$16 million.
Ted Husveth, managing director of US Credit at Tradeweb, added, “We’ve collaborated with our clients all the way through our design and launch of portfolio trading, and this has informed so many of our successive enhancements to the protocol, from the introduction of competitive quoting in October 2019 to trading at the close. We have a robust roadmap ahead of us, and are excited to adapt our technology further as we approach the new year.”
©Markets Media Europe, 2021
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