MARKETAXESS HOLDINGS INC (MKTX)

MarketAxess Holdings Inc. operates electronic trading platforms for global fixed-income markets, serving over 2,000 institutional investor and broker-dealer firms that trade U.S. high-grade bonds, U.S. high-yield bonds, emerging market debt, Eurobonds, municipal bonds, U.S. government bonds and other fixed-income securities, including agency bonds, European and other government bonds and leveraged loans. Its Open Trading marketplace is an all-to-all protocol in which more than 1,700 firms, including investment managers, global and regional dealers and specialist market makers, interact anonymously. The company also offers a traditional disclosed request-for-quote protocol, in which it is not a counterparty to trades between institutional and dealer clients.

Its newest platform, X-Pro, introduced in 2023, combines trading protocols with proprietary data and pre-trade analytics and supports portfolio trading. The company also provides automated and algorithmic trading solutions such as Auto-X and Adaptive Auto-X, and it acquired Pragma in 2023 to extend algorithmic trading to equities and foreign exchange and to accelerate AI-driven execution algorithms. It supplies data and analytics products, including CP+ and Axess All, for real-time pricing and transaction cost analysis.

Post-trade services include straight-through processing, trade matching, trade publication, regulatory transaction reporting and market and reference data. In 2023, 88.1% of revenues came from commissions on transactions executed on its platforms, 6.2% from data products and 5.3% from post-trade services. Total credit trading volume reached about $3.1 trillion in 2023, with estimated market shares of 20.4% in U.S. high-grade and 17.1% in U.S. high-yield corporate bonds.

Roughly 90.9% of credit volume was executed by institutional clients. International clients, located in over 90 countries and accessing the platforms through regulated venues in Europe, Asia and Latin America, accounted for 20.8% of revenues. The platform supports emerging market local currency bonds in 28 currencies.

Founded in 2000, MarketAxess is an S&P 500 company. Its strategy focuses on increasing penetration of credit markets, expanding into newer products such as municipal bonds (including through the 2021 MuniBrokers acquisition), U.S. government bonds, European government bonds and emerging market local currency bonds, broadening trading protocols, growing internationally, and pursuing selective acquisitions and alliances, including a 2022 minority investment in RFQ-hub.