Automated Trading—Why the sum is greater than the value of individual parts
By Andrew Cameron | 22 September 2025
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The network effect of Automation
Traders and portfolio managers are becoming more confident putting automation to work to optimize their fixed income trading workflows, and are increasingly harnessing a greater risk appetite, as both dealer and buy-side algos continue to offer immense time savings.
Percent of responses from Algos by Quarter & Size Bucket US HG
As risk appetite increases, so has velocity, and diversity of flow across retail, SMAs, systematics, and Portfolio Trades. The buy side is increasingly comfortable providing liquidity through automated workflows. Likewise, the sell side is increasingly comfortable taking liquidity through automated workflows— ~10% of Dealer-initiated RFQ is now done through Auto-X™. But as these factors increase, so do demands for even greater efficiencies across how each firm implements these algorithmic and automated workflows.
As more participants adopt automation, the ecosystem becomes richer in data, deeper in liquidity, and more efficient in execution. MarketAxess has already seen this in action: Since inception, our clients have executed over 10 million automation trades, and YTD, our automation suite helped drive over 36% of our clients' global RFQ tickets—even higher in USHG and EUR, as institutions seek scale, precision, and performance in fixed income through these workflows.
Adaptive Auto-X: Why this matters
Adaptive Auto-X, the award-winning MarketAxess Smart Order Routing (SOR) suite of execution strategies, is a unified platform that brings together multiple protocols, data sources, and trader objectives into a single, intelligent workflow. Designed by fixed income traders for fixed income traders, Adaptive offers a host of customizable strategies—Take, Seek, Provide—that adapt to market conditions and user intent throughout the day. Each strategy is crafted based on historical use cases and client feedback. These customized strategies open more opportunities for users to increase their velocity of trades as well as tackle orders across multiple protocols.
Select which strategy matches your priorities
With Adaptive, users can aggregate across multiple liquidity sources and navigate complex pools with ease by accessing the full stack of MarketAxess protocols. Clients need the fastest and most powerful market technology to offer new trading signals, more effective controls, and opportunities to scale operational inefficiency.
Data that drives Best Execution
So, what can you do now to optimize execution paths? Within Adaptive, you hold the ability to issue an RFQ, respond to an RFQ, post to order books, and engage in Auctions for a bond at a specific price and quantity. Our developers have built these strategies with a long history of OTC execution in algorithms, marrying these concepts with the nuances of the fixed income market. The past 3 years have been focused on building out the plumbing of Adaptive and making sure our clients are well-connected. But now comes the fun stuff.
Performance Matters: ADX Provide Strategy, Executed Level vs CP+
The Automated Trading Research team at MarketAxess, has developed advanced dashboarding and transaction cost analysis tools to enhance pre-trade transparency. These tools integrate real-time data signals that inform execution strategies and support more predictive, data-driven workflows. This helps clients align execution outcomes with their own definitions of best execution—going beyond price improvement to include certainty, timing, and cost.
Within Adaptive, clients benefit from rigorous performance reporting and quality reviews, supported by oversight from MarketAxess senior management. As market transparency increases, so does the need for workflows that are not only automated but also measurable and accountable. MarketAxess data plays a central role in this evolution, helping firms meet regulatory expectations of best execution, but also optimizing execution quality based on the client’s standards. Clients need a trusted partner that is aligned with their goals, making best execution a competitive advantage and not just a compliance checkbox.
Optimizing front-to-back office
Automation is not just a tool for traders; it is foundational to the entire investment and order lifecycle. From portfolio managers and risk teams to operations and compliance, the benefits of automation ripple across the front, middle, and back office. Real-time processing into risk systems, streamlined trade matching, and automated settlement workflows reduce manual intervention, lower operational risk, and improve overall efficiency.
For traders, algorithmic execution tools offer the ability to break large orders into smaller, more manageable pieces, minimizing market impact and execution risk. Operationally, automation simplifies complexity. It enables seamless communication between execution platforms like Adaptive Auto-X and a firm’s preferred order or execution management systems (O/EMS), including proprietary setups. This integration supports real-time order status updates and execution visibility, while also enabling innovations like collapsing multiple fills into a single ticket—reducing shrouded ticket costs for smaller funds and simplifying allocations for larger asset managers.
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Beyond execution, automation enhances risk management and compliance. Real-time pricing and liquidity models empower traders, while automated audit trails and standardized workflows support regulatory reporting and oversight. In this environment of increased transparency, firms can better assess counterparty optimization.
The trader is always in control
The best-performing workflows are the ones that are tailored to your needs. Each Adaptive strategy, as well as each configuration, is customizable to your objectives, for whatever trading use case you have. Whether you are trading a conventional RFQ list, working your order opportunistically, or even streaming two-way markets, the market practitioner is always in control of the order.
Paramount to success is ease of use with any automated execution tool. Within Adaptive, our nimble UI allows for increased transparency due to comprehensive dashboarding, tailored reports, and live status notifications, with the option to customize the entire front end.
Risk controls and guardrails within the Adaptive interface have been back-tested and quantified, showing users insights on slippage, and levels that are too good or too bad, to offer a sensible and risk-mitigated experience.
Plus, in a fragmented ecosystem, clients and their O/EMS platforms often face the burden of connecting to multiple trading and data protocols—each with its own API structure, standards, and limitations. These inconsistencies can create friction, slow innovation, and limit access to the full capabilities of evolving protocols.
Adaptive Auto-X addresses this challenge by offering a simplified, API-driven architecture built on common industry standards. This centralized approach gives clients precision control over execution workflows while streamlining access to a broad range of trading protocols, all through a single, consistent interface. As protocols evolve, Adaptive ensures clients can adopt new features quickly and efficiently, without the need for repeated custom development. Moreover, its architecture is designed to extend beyond MarketAxess, with integrations underway to connect with external venues—further enhancing flexibility and reach. The result is a future-proofed infrastructure that accelerates innovation while reducing operational drag and unnecessary tech overhead.
The sum is greater than the value of the individual parts
The evolution of automated trading has grown rapidly, and the efficiencies offered by Adaptive and other SOR technologies compound across the trade lifecycle, turning what were once isolated improvements into a cohesive way for firms to level up their workflows, where the sum of these factors is greater than the value of individual parts. Adaptive allows users to plug-and-play, at no added cost. It ensures our clients are leaving no money on the table across opportunities within MarketAxess, and eventually, even outside of the MarketAxess environment. Once a user signs onto the platform to execute, they immediately gain access to a network of participants, deeper liquidity, proprietary pricing, and execution data for both pre-trade and post-settlement.
Automation has helped drive flavors of equitization in the bond market, yet on bond market terms, increasing transparency and efficiency. However, these workflows become even more powerful when integrated with humanistic features that are unique and proprietary to MarketAxess, a firm with a strong history of building innovative solutions for our clients.