My market insights as see in the press
Electronic trading platforms accounted for roughly 21% of muni bond volume in the first quarter of the year, surpassing the all-time high of roughly 20% in 2023, according to a research note from Crisil Coalition Greenwich.
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Mr. McPartland said, “The transparency of this critical market has also seen tremendous growth. We have transitioned from weekly volume reports in 2020 that included only primary dealer activity to the current reporting regime that provides public access to daily trading activity by market segment, and the details of nearly every on-the-run U.S. Treasury coupon bond traded each day. This has brought the Treasury market more closely in line with other U.S. securities and listed derivatives markets, ensuring that investors and market participants of all types and sizes have the information they need to make informed decisions.”
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“Competition has gotten fiercer as credit markets have become more automated, which is making it harder for banks to make money,” said Kevin McPartland, head of market structure and technology research at Crisil Coalition Greenwich. “We’ve seen this over the decades in other markets. It causes people to look at their costs, not just their revenues.”
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“While volume doesn’t always equate to profitable trading, macro desks tend to perform well in this environment,” said Kevin McPartland, head of market structure and technology at Coalition Greenwich.
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Automation has helped lift trading volume by more than 40% since 2022, even as sell-side trading desk headcount continues to decline, according to Kevin McPartland, Crisil’s head of market structure and technology research.
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“Despite the boost the change in regulatory approach has provided to the industry, we’d be remiss not to think about the potential for the exuberance to become irrational,” said Kevin McPartland, head of Research for Market Structure & Technology at Crisil Coalition Greenwich.
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“The volume growth [in voice trading] is coming in large part from these large package trades that are executed manually,” said Kevin McPartland, Coalition Greenwich’s head of market structure and technology research.
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“March 2020 was a really big test for auto-quoters and automatic execution and not everything worked as planned,” said Kevin McPartland, head of market structure and technology research at Crisil Coalition Greenwich.
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To facilitate bond ETF arbitrage, specialists like Jane Street and Flow Traders have stepped into the underlying bond market, creating a “virtuous cycle”, according to Kevin McPartland, head of research for Coalition Greenwich: "To do that trade, they had to get better and smarter at trading not only the ETFs, but also the underlying corporate bonds. To some extent, the rest is history."
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Kevin McPartland, head of market structure at Coalition Greenwich, says the central clearing proposal was “definitely a monumental change for the Treasury market”, adding that enacting it will be a “big accomplishment” for the SEC.
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“For 15 years, the bond market we have today hasn’t existed,” said Kevin McPartland, head of market-structure research at Coalition Greenwich, a data and analytics firm. “That means this is the first time in a lot of people’s investing lives when bonds are a real alternative to stocks.”
Read Article →A selection of my interviews and discussions with key figures in financial markets
With: Kevin McPartland
I provided testimony to the House Committee on Financial services about the role of derivatives in the U.S. Treasury Market.
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With: Chris Edmund, President of Fixed Income and Data Services
Chris Edmonds recently spent some time with Kevin at ICE's cool new NYSE studio in New York discussing prediction markets, alternative data, the mortgage market, the bond market, and how Chris gets his news in the morning.
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With: Mike Lynch, COO, Symphony
Workflow automation in the capital markets, which began with bots and has moved to GenAI-based copilots today, is set to adopt agentic AI with early use cases already emerging, according to Michael Lynch, COO of communication and market technology firm Symphony.
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With: Mike Sobel, Co-CEO Trumid, Jason Quinn, Chief Product Officer, Trumid
My conversation with Trumid about the electronification of the U.S. corporate bond market.
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With: Steve Cavoli, Head of Execution Services, Virtu
Steve Cavoli, Head of Execution Services at Virtu Financial, is clear about the firm’s place in the evolving capital markets ecosystem. “Our job is not to create a mini-Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley… Our heart is of a start-up and a disruptor, and that's what we want to do,” he said to Kevin McPartland, Head of Market Structure & Technology Research at Coalition Greenwich, in an interview at the New York Stock Exchange.
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With: Billy Hult, CEO Tradeweb
“It’s been a great year. This is still a relationship business. That said, the relationship component is part of the overall experience that technology has delivered to our clients,” Tradeweb CEO Billy Hult recently told Coalition Greenwich Head of Market Structure & Technology Research Kevin McPartland in an interview at Tradeweb’s New York headquarters in front of a live audience.
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With: Chris Concannon, CEO, MarketAxess
The fixed-income markets are poised to enter the next phase of electronification which will change both trading behaviors and outcomes, declares Chris Concannon, CEO, MarketAxess.
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With: Hester Peirce, Commissioner, SEC
SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce, who has worked on both the legislative and regulatory sides of the table for over 20 years, spoke about current issues with Kevin McPartland, Head of Market Structure and Technology Research, Coalition Greenwich.
Watch/Listen →Blog posts, research papers, and industry analysis
While some new technologies show promise in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is having a big impact now, and fixed-income investors agree.
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U.S. Treasury trading in 2025 was defined by record volumes and the lowest average volatility since 2021.
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The pace of change going into 2026 shows no signs of slowing. Competition between capital markets firms, AI disruption, tokenization, private credit, and an aggressive regulatory agenda will keep everyone busy for the foreseeable future—whether bond and stock prices decide to keep going up or take a pause.
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As the federal funds rate grew to 5%, holding bonds until maturity was in vogue again. Retail bond buyers loved the high yields (relative to the zero rates they were used to) without the worry of short-term market movements that can impact the value of mutual funds and ETFs. As a result, individual bond holdings grew to 51% of retail fixed-income investments at the end of Q2 2025 (the most recent data), only slightly below the peak of 51.8% reached in Q4 2023.
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The U.S. Treasury central limit order book (CLOB) has been a cornerstone of the U.S. Treasury market for three decades, providing a platform for buyers and sellers to trade with anonymity, firm prices and instant execution.
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Despite this progress, a robust futures market—something taken for granted by interest-rate and equity traders—has, until recently, eluded the credit market.
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In an effort to better understand these trends, including how volatility data is used and measured by market participants, if and how they trade volatility, and what improvements they’d like to see in their volatility metrics, we interviewed 38 interest-rate traders and portfolio managers at asset managers, hedge funds, dealers, and market makers in the U.S. in Q2 2025.
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While the importance and influence of the largest banks in global markets can’t be overstated, the influence of the “bulge bracket” NBLPs on market pricing and market structure (let alone their revenues) continues to increase.
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The European corporate bond market experienced impressive growth in 2024, with daily trading volumes growing 18% to reach €12.1 billion per day in 2024 ($13 billion).
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