MarketAxess Holdings Inc.

MarketAxess Holdings Inc. operates an electronic trading platform that enables the trade of corporate bonds and other types of fixed-income instruments. MarketAxess' trading technology allows institutional investor clients to request executable bids or offers from multiple broker-dealers simultaneously, and to execute trades with the broker-dealer of their choice.
The company went public in November 5, 2004 and at the end of 2018 had a market cap of $9.1 billion. Its market cap rose to $14.8 billion at the end of August 2019. It was added to the S&P 500 Index in the summer of 2019. 
More than 1,500 institutional investors are users of the MarketAxess' Open Trading platform called Live Markets, which offers U.S. and European high-grade corporate bonds, high-yield and emerging markets bonds, agency bonds, asset-backed and preferred securities and credit default swaps. MarketAxess also offers a number of trading-related products and services, including market data, connectivity solutions that facilitate straight-through processing, technology services, and execution services for exchange-traded fund managers and other clients.
MarketAxess SEF Corporation is registered as a Swap Execution Facility with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It is headquartered in New York and has offices in London, Amsterdam, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, São Paulo, Hong Kong and Singapore. 
MarketAxess expanded its trading system in April 2016 to the $3.6 trillion municipal bond market. 
== History ==
Credit Trading
MarketAxess was formed in April 2000 with the aim of creating a single trading platform with access to multi-dealer pricing in a wide range of credit products. MarketAxess has since expanded and expanded its trading network with North American institutional investors, including investment advisers, mutual funds, insurance companies, public and private pension funds, bank portfolios and hedge funds, and leading broker-dealers, both primary dealers and regional firms. MarketAxess offers dealers presence in secondary markets.
The U.S. trading system supports fully-disclosed electronic trading in high-grade corporate bonds, high-yield/crossover bonds, emerging markets bonds, U.S. agency securities and credit default swaps (CDS).
MarketAxess Europe Limited, the wholly-owned U.K. subsidiary of MarketAxess Holdings Inc., operates in London and first launched European secondary trading in U.S. dollar and Euro-denominated Eurobonds in 2001. Since then, the platform has added trading in other European credit products including bonds issued in British pounds, euro, and floating rate notes (FRNs) and has since expanded into sovereigns, supras, agency and covered bonds. MarketAxess Europe Limited was the first platform in Europe to offer this capability for corporate bonds. As of 2006, European institutional clients can access U.S. credit liquidity, provided they have established trading relationships with U.S. dealers.
MarketAxess was given the green light in February of 2019 by the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) to operate its trading platform and reporting services in Amsterdam. The approval means MarketAxess will be able to continue providing uninterrupted services and liquidity to its clients in the European Union and the UK post-Brexit.
Market Data
MarketAxess offers the Corporate BondTicker, which provides market participants with real-time FINRA TRACE data with MarketAxess trade data and analytical tools. Corporate BondTicker is offered as a Web-based service and is also integrated into the trading system. The source for corporate bond information for the Wall Street Journal beginning in September 2005, Corporate BondTicker has since added compliance monitoring tools and CDS analytics. In 2008, MarketAxess launched European BondTicker, which displays market standard pricing data with MarketAxess enrichments. MarketAxess also provides market data as a data feed that can be published externally to third-party subscribers or integrated directly into internal systems via MarketAxess Technologies.
Trade West Systems is the data automation provider division of MarketAxess Technologies Inc. In November 2011, it was announced that a partnership with Trade West Systems would enable BondDesk clients to source liquidity from third party platforms that compete with the BondDesk ATS. 
Technologies
MarketAxess formed a wholly-owned affiliate, MarketAxess Technologies Inc., in November 2007 and acquired Trade West Systems, LLC, a Salt Lake City-based financial software and technology services provider of gateway adapters for connecting order management systems and trading systems to fixed-income trading venues. In March 2008, MarketAxess Technologies acquired Greenline Financial Technologies, Inc., a Chicago-based provider of integration, testing and management solutions for proprietary and FIX Protocol related products and services designed to optimize the electronic trading of fixed income, equity, derivatives and other exchange-based products.
In May 2011, MarketAxess announced the launch of their electronic trading platform for preferred stocks and consumer-based asset-backed securities (ABS). According to the firm, it is the first electronic fixed income marketplace to offer trading of preferred stocks for institutional investors. Later in the month, they announced that RBS was the first dealer to provide streaming, executable markets to MarketAxess for CDS indices. 
In July 2011, MarketAxess announced the launch of an institutional credit trading system that it says includes significant additional functionality for credit default swap trading. With this release, MarketAxess said it had much of the core technology needed to meet the anticipated regulatory requirements for registration as a swap execution facility (SEF) and security-based swap execution facility (SB SEF) under the Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S.
In August 2019, the firm announced the acquisition of LiquidityEdge, an electronic marketplace for US Treasuries, for $150 million. The move complements MarketAxcess's global credit markets and was completed in November 2019. MarketAxess said the firm was looking to expand its dealer-to-deal platform through custom connections.
MarketAxess acquired MuniBrokers, an electronic venue for interdealer brokers and dealers, on April 9, 2021.
On Sept. 28, 2021 MarketAxess announced the launch of a new trading channel for its global investors to access the China Interbank Bond Market (CIBM). Access is via the connection between CFETS and MKTX under the Bond Connect and CIBM Direct schemes, in partnership with China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) and Bond Connect Company Limited (BCCL). The launch gives global investors on MarketAxess the ability to trade onshore Chinese bonds through a single, integrated trading interface. The addition of the China interbank market extended MarketAxess's global fixed income trading coverage, which reached $669 billion in total credit trading volume in the second quarter of 2021.
On August 9, 2023, MarketAxess announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Pragma, a quantitative trading technology provider specializing in algorithmic and analytical services in equities, FX and fixed-income.
== Key People ==
*Chris Concannon, Chief Executive Officer
*Richard M. McVey, Executive Chairman and Founder
*Christopher N. Gerosa, Chief Financial Officer
*Nash Panchal, Chief Information Officer
*Kevin McPherson, Head of U.S. Sales
*David Krein, Head of Research
*Christophe Roupie, Head of Europe and Asia 
*James N.B. Rucker, Credit and Risk Officer
*Cordelia M. Boise, Head of Human Resources
*Florencia Panizza, Head of Marketing and Communications
*Charles R. Hood, General Counsel
*Bruce Repasy, Global Head of Product Engineering
== References ==
Category:MarketsWiki Page of the Day