For buy-side clients, TradeWeb remains the most important single channel for liquidity in the government bond market. In US treasuries, over 65,000 trades a month are executed through the platform, with an average daily volume of over $20 billion. On one day in July, dealers traded $44.8 billion-worth of US treasuries. Trading in European sovereigns increased 86% to e509 billion between the first half of 2002 and the first half of 2003. Average daily volume has hit e4.2 billion.
This growth partly reflects how TradeWeb is still adding dealers and products to its platforms. By the middle of September 2003, there were 22 dealers on the European sovereigns platform and TradeWeb was about to introduce Scandinavian government bonds to the system. TradeWeb introduced US treasury trading in European hours in September 2002 and a year later was close to providing round-the-clock trading in US treasuries. The number of buy-side users signed up is impressive and still rising.
The platform had its first e1 billion trade in 2003, and it is handling increasing numbers of trades of e100 million and over.
But TradeWeb’s biggest strides in 2003 have been in straight-through processing. Now available in Europe, TradeXpress links everyone – dealers, buyers, and custodians – in a trade to every other party.