Best market data provider (vendor)—MarketAxess

Product overview—MarketAxess Data Suite

The MarketAxess data tools and automation suite—featuring such tools as Auto-X, Adaptive Auto-X and CP+—leverage MarketAxess’ position in the market and its access to public, private and proprietary data. The firm’s machine learning capabilities and real-time processing provide clients with accurate and transparent liquidity metrics, intraday liquidity scoring and intraday pricing.

Secret sauce

With artificial intelligence-driven real-time pricing and liquidity scoring, MarketAxess’ tools help clients gain insights into pre-execution data for optimizing request-for-quote (RFQ) responses and hit rates by offering liquidity and pricing data. The firm’s data stack collects the breadth of trading data across the MarketAxess electronic trading platform and presents it in real time to users in an actionable format, allowing them to improve their execution outcomes and streamline or automate their fixed-income trading workflows.

Recent milestones

• MarketAxess’ core data pricing tool, CP+, generates more than 50 million two-sided levels on more than 290,000 bonds across multiple liquidity scores, daily.
• In the fourth quarter of 2023, CP+ used more than 325,000 firm prices per day and accessed daily pricing on 80% more bonds than public sources alone for US investment-grade and high-yield bonds, providing users with high-quality transactional inputs.

Future objectives

• MarketAxess’ data team will continue to focus on growing CP+ coverage for new and more illiquid (thinly traded) bonds and growing the tiers of the pricing engine.
• MarketAxess will continue to strengthen key partnerships with MSCI and RFQ-hub to drive growth, as well as further integrate acquisitions such as Pragma, acquired in October 2023, to enhance its quantitative trading solutions.

Why MarketAxess won

MarketAxess wins the coveted best market data provider (vendor) category in this year’s Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards, usurping last year’s winner, Bloomberg, as leader of the pack in this perennially competitive category. Key to the New York-based fixed-income specialist’s success are its Auto-X and Adaptive Auto-X algo trading tools and its outstanding CP+ algorithmic corporate bond pricing tool/engine. It is no secret that accurately and transparently pricing thinly traded fixed-income securities is a constant thorn in the side of all market participants, a challenge made all the more acute when market data is either unreliable or absent altogether. That is MarketAxess’ bread and butter, which makes it one of the go‑to providers of accurate and transparent fixed-income pricing data, and a name that industry professionals have come to trust over the years.