Market Surfer

Price, trade, monitor all your bond business across multiple ECNs and your own web portal with a single trading interface and rich functionality.

The system provides interfaces to the full range of ECNs in the market place and provides a single application for your entire bond trading needs.

Connectivity

The Market Surfer Application provides an easy to use interface for automatically or manually publishing your bond prices to the ECNs you wish to participate. Published prices can be indicative or executable, and the trader has a range of tools to effectively manage the published prices. Bond pricing can be suspended in one mouse-click and resumed cleanly.

The system can manage orders through the pricing mechanism with a rich selection of order types such as Fill & Kill, Fill or Kill etc supported. These can even be used where the selected ECN does not natively support the functionality (although the success of order cancellation is no longer guaranteed).

ECN connectivity is supported by the use of separate ECB Gateways, which communicate with the ECNs of choice. If new ECNs become available new Gateways can be added to the system simply without complex reconfiguration. The gateways are designed to be failsafe and are constantly monitored by watchdog processes. Price contributions and orders are automatically suspended if any error condition is detected.

Trading

The system supports three levels of trading: fully automatic, automated, and manual, the trader sets configuration limits to control how trading takes place.

Fully Automatic Trading

When the trader is pricing bonds automatically they have the opportunity to define spreads to apply to the prices depending on volume and the type of counterparty. If a counterparty wishes to trade at the published price and the volume is within the range specified by the trader the trade executes automatically and the trader is notified by an alert on their trade blotter.

Automated Trading

When counterparties wish to trade based on indicative prices or at volumes that fall outside the defined ranges the system switches to quote request/response mode. The counterparty requests a quote and the trader is instantly alerted on screen. The trader responds with a price that the counterparty can accept or refuse. The counterparty can also make a counteroffer that will again be alerted to the trader. The process continues until a price is agreed or the quote is cancelled.

Manual Trading

When the trader is looking to trade in the market the application offers a large range of tools to assist in finding the best possible price. The trader can view the best prices, yields, spreads, or basis across all inter-dealer ECNs he is participating in. The information shown depends on the quotation with conversions happening on the fly where necessary. In addition he can instantly see the depth of market aggregated across all the ECNs in a single trading screen. He can trade on any price shown in the depth of market list with a single mouse-click.

In addition orders can be entered and are automatically published to all the ECNs that he has chosen to participate in.

Pricing Engine

The Pricing Engine consists of a number of servers calculating and publishing bond and swap curves, CTD information for bond futures contracts and generate other input to be used for pricing in the Pricing Sheet. The Pricing Engine allows the trader to price his bonds automatically on the basis of other financial instruments, as well as allowing manual and external source pricing. The Pricing Engine employs dynamic linking to allow the seamless incorporation of proprietary pricing models if desired.

The instruments the bonds are priced off can be priced by other Market Surfer users or come direct from market feeds.