Knowledge Center

Automation in European credit trading is moving from early adoption to mainstream execution, driven by greater transparency, deeper liquidity pools and the rapid expansion of high-quality data.

The buy and sell sides are increasingly becoming comfortable with and utilizing automation in credit trading. Ryan Steffen, Product Specialist, explains what's behind this growth and how traders can gain a competitive edge using the MarketAxess suite of automation products, Auto-X™.

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.

During April 2025’s tariff-driven turbulence, credit markets saw notable but orderly volatility, unlike the severe disruptions of the COVID-19 crisis. The April 2 tariff announcement triggered uneven global market swings, highlighting credit markets’ growing resilience through increased dealer algos and steady PT performance, which are strengthening market structure.

MarketAxess is on a mission to optimize trading workflows and technology resources by enhancing and expanding our Auto-X™ suite of automation protocols. The efficacy of our classic Auto-X RFQ (launched in 2018) is evidenced by the impressive growth in auto-executed trade volume, surpassing ...

Highlights and objectives We aim to examine the price impact of client-initiated inquiries on the market, during a period of extreme volatility, to examine what drives information leakage. When trading large EUR IG blocks on MarketAxess in March 2023 , traders managed to minimize market...

Highlights Time to trade is on average 13 times faster in the EU markets than in the US: the median time to trade is 43 seconds in EUR IG vs 10 minutes in USD IG. Growth of algos in both EU and US markets means that trading can be faster than it used to be. Submitters already calibrate their...