MarketAxess Holdings Inc. is an international financial technology company that operates an electronic trading platform for the institutional credit markets, and also provides market data and post-trade services. It enables institutional investors and broker-dealers to trade credit instruments, including corporate bonds, and other types of fixed income products. MarketAxess was founded in 2000 by Richard McVey, who is still the company’s Chairman & Chief Executive Officer. Headquartered in New York, MarketAxess has 454 employees and serves clients in the Americas, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Today, it is the market leader in the electronic trading of US corporate bonds, with 85% of investment-grade and 84% of high-yield debt traded electronically on its platform. That equates to 20% of all corporate bond trading volume in the US. As of April 2018, the company is valued at $8.5bn.
History
McVey originally proposed the model for MarketAxess in 1999 as part of J.P. Morgan's Lab Morgan program, which was designed to back executives’ ideas for using web-based technology. He launched the company as an independent venture in 2000, with $24 million in capital which he’d raised from other market participants including Bear Stearns. In November that year, MarketAxess began trading investment-grade corporate bonds and gave investors access to new issues and research. In 2001, MarketAxess acquired Trading Edge Inc., which owned BondLink, a start-up bond company that had enabled investors to buy and sell bonds online. The company went public in 2004, with a stock value of $11 a share. In 2012, MarketAxess announced a partnership to link up with BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, which hosts more than $10 trillion of client assets, as part of its plans to develop an ‘all-to-all’ electronic marketplace. That year it announced the launch of its all-to-all trading marketplace, Open Trading. In 2013, MarketAxess acquired London-based Trax, a provider of market data and post-trade services, including trade matching and regulatory reporting. In 2015, MarketAxess and BlackRock extended their Open Trading partnership, already in place in the US, to the European credit markets. The alliance, which benefits BlackRock clients using its Aladdin platform, aimed to improve liquidity and reduce transaction costs for European market participants. That year MarketAxess’s Open Trading platform had a record fourth quarter, with approximately 125,000 total transactions and an average daily traded volume of $831 million, up 86% from the previous year. In the summer of 2017, MarketAxess announced it was establishing an office in Amsterdam. In 2018, MarketAxess reported that January was a record month for electronic daily and monthly trading volumes on its platform, which it attributed in part to new regulatory reporting rules required by MiFID II, a regulation which came into force on 3 January. In March the company announced the extension of its all-to-all Open Trading partnership with BlackRock to Asia, focused mainly on US dollar-denominated corporate and sovereign bonds and other securities traded by market participants in the region. In 2019, MarketAxess Holdings was announced the second best stock in the 2010s, with a total return of 3,015%. In August 2019, the company announced it would enter Treasury trading with the acquisition of the LiquidityEdge platform, a minor player in Treasuries, for $150 million.
