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A Turning Point for the Bond Market

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This is a significant turning point, and it means a lot of things for the bond market.

As we all know when rates are declining and we're in a bull market, liquidity is plentiful, assets are appreciating, and liquidity is really not a problem.

Always, when you hit a bear market, liquidity becomes more of a problem, whether that's stocks or bonds or whatever. I think it can be even more exacerbated in the bond market because it's really an over- the- counter market so there's a lot of market structure challenges that affect an OTC market rather than an exchange market.

For example, you get one customer looking to sell bonds and talking to one dealer, another customer looking to buy bonds and talking to another dealer and how do you connect the dots and those two natural buyers find each other?

A second challenge becomes that, the dealers which have balance sheets and use that and deploy that to facilitate liquidity, obviously, in a bear market, the bonds are a hot potato, you need to buy them, but you want to sell them and redistribute them as quickly as possible. So what are the technologies, how can we advance the bond market so dealers can use technology to distribute risk better and quicker? And that's some of the things we're thinking about.

Speakers:

Jim Toffey

Jim Toffey

CEO and Co-Founder,
LTX, A Broadridge Company

Kevin McPartland

Kevin McPartland

Head of Market Structure &
Technology Research,
Coalition Greenwich