ITB Unveils New Data Display in Updated Trading Interface

ITB has already rolled out the web-based front end─which displays prices and other data from the four bond trading venues that the vendor is already connected to─to about one-third of its client base of banks, buy-side firms and municipal treasuries prior to today's official release, after testing with a select group of clients, and plans to migrate the remainder shortly after go-live.

"The biggest changes are the ease of calling data, and the way we display the best bid, best offer and spread," says ITB chief executive Michael Chuang. For example, the best bid and ask are displayed directly alongside one another, with the bid yield and ask yield on either side, and the bid and ask size on the outside of the yield columns, with other values such as maturity and coupon, and the security's ticker and CUSIP code to the far left of the prices. When a trader clicks a bond in the display, they immediately see streaming market depth, along with the spread to the benchmark curve, size and depth, rather than waiting for the interface to retrieve datasets. "Every mouse-click you can eliminate saves the time for traders," Chuang adds.

"These are all things you take for granted in the equities world," he says. "In equities, everybody trades on price. But in fixed income, it's different: yes, price is one way to trade, but the majority of institutional investors execute based on the spread to the treasury curve, so we need to display not just the price but also the spread."

In addition, whereas in the past clients could only respond with trade orders to prices displayed in the system, the new interface will allow participants to submit quotes─displayed as indications of interest─that indicate to the marketplace the price at which they are willing to buy or sell.

"On day one, we had a more equities-like, more basic interface. But the new version is more tailored to institutional fixed income traders─primarily because we now have a couple of years' more experience in what our clients want and need," Chuang says, adding that rather than adding functionality via "a bunch of band-aids" to fulfill what ITB wanted to be able to offer and what clients had requested, the vendor decided to rebuild its front end from the ground up─a project that took about a year from inception to turning the design into code that is both "functional and visually appealing."

Chuang says the new interface also makes data easier to access for a market that has traditionally been less data-driven and more relationship-driven. "The interface in general makes it very easy for people to trade. And when you make it easy for people to trade, you're making it easy for people to interact with data," he says. "Traders don't like change─that's why we are rolling out the new interface slowly. Traders can still use the old interface if they want, but no one has asked for the old one back."