Before revision: With the rise of the electronic trading, corporate bond traders have access to data information of past trades. As a first step to automation, they have to start monitoring their own trades, and using past data to build a benchmark for the expected transaction costs with given bond characteristics and market conditions.
After revision: Electronic platform has been increasingly popular for the execution of large orders among asset managers dealing desks. Properly monitoring each individual trade by the appropriate Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA) is the first key step towards this electronic automation. One of the challenges in TCA is to build a benchmark for the expected transaction costs with given bond characteristics and market conditions.