Bloomberg has announced the launch of the Portfolio Trading Basket Builder (Basket Builder), an enhancement to its existing portfolio trading workflow, which incorporates reference to Bloomberg’s Evaluated Pricing Service (BVAL).

Bloomberg has announced the launch of the Portfolio Trading Basket Builder (Basket Builder), an enhancement to its existing portfolio trading workflow, which incorporates reference to Bloomberg’s Evaluated Pricing Service (BVAL). The newly introduced functionality will enable market participants to more efficiently and effectively integrate data, analytics, and communication tools to find the optimal basket of bonds prior to electronic execution.

Using the Basket Builder, clients can create a portfolio basket by dragging and dropping securities from portfolios or monitors within Bloomberg, or from external files or their order management system (OMS).  This builds on the ‘RFQ to Many’ functionality for portfolio trading introduced by Bloomberg in December 2020. Once the optimal basket is created through Basket Builder, it can easily be traded on an all-or-none basis, via BOLT, Bloomberg’s list trading tool. Traders can put up to six dealers in competition, and BVAL can be used as a reference, in addition to other market standard quote types and references. BVAL supplies independent and transparent evaluated pricing for over 2.7 million securities across GSAC, Securitized Products, Municipals and Curves daily.

“Portfolio trading is an important part of today’s credit trading landscape. It enables firms to trade a basket of bonds quickly and efficiently, which is more important than ever in the current market environment,” said Robert Simnick, Credit Portfolio Specialist at Invesco. “We are happy to see greater innovation in this space at a time when portfolio trading continues to gain traction.”

“While Portfolio Trading is not new, its use and utility has grown steadily over the past few years.” said Kevin McPartland, Head of Market Structure & Technology Research at Coalition Greenwich. “As the tools used for portfolio trading continue to improve and expand, market participants will more easily unearth the liquidity and price improvement that portfolio trading can provide.”

“As the use of portfolio trading grows, Bloomberg is focused on providing market participants with access to robust data and analytics alongside communication and trading tools to find the other side of their trades quickly and at the best possible price,” said Paul Kaplan, Global Head of Credit, Equities, TRS and Price Transparency at Bloomberg. “These enhancements help optimize the entire portfolio trading workflow, and represent our continued investment in our electronic trading offerings.”

The Basket Builder provides clients the ability to communicate internally across teams or trading desks, and supports communication between buy- and sell-side traders. Traders can analyze multiple portfolio trading data points, including net proceeds, average duration and liquidity scores. They have the ability to compare basket and individual levels to multiple pricing sources including BVAL and the Composite Bloomberg Bond Trader (CBBT), a weighted average of dealer-contributed near real-time prices on Bloomberg’s Fixed Income Trading solution (FIT) during trading hours.