Benchmarks for cash treasuries, interest rate swaps in play
Bloomberg has gained an edge over Thomson Reuters in the business of providing transaction data for the rates markets.
Bloomberg announced in July that NEX’s BrokerTec, arguably the most popular source of data on U.S. Treasuries trading, will now make its data available through Bloomberg instead of Thomson Reuters. The BrokerTec data will be combined with data on interest rate swaps from Tradition, a major inter-dealer broker, in a new bundle to be known as the Bloomberg Capital Markets Package.
The BrokerTec platform is the pricing reference used for 80% of daily trading volume in Treasury securities, according to a Greenwich Associates study quoted by Bloomberg. Tradition, meanwhile, runs one of the biggest trading platforms for interest rate swaps, with quotes submitted to its central limit order book by some of the world’s largest interest rate swaps market makers and participants.
But Thomson Reuters has come back swinging, with the announcement in August of a substitute service for Treasuries provided by Dealerweb and the continuation of its existing arrangement to source interest rate swap data from TP ICAP. Dealerweb is the wholesale and inter-dealer trading division of Tradeweb Markets. This is the first time Tradeweb’s Dealerweb pricing has been made available to the market, and Thomson Reuters claims that its new lineup will give investors “the most comprehensive source for inter-bank data in the market.”
