SIA SHOW: ILX Boosts Fixed-Income Content

With the end of a Telerate exclusive on Cantor Fitzgerald bond prices, ILX Systems has been beefing up its fixed-income content and will be demonstrating that through an evolving product called FI Focus.

"It's a pretty rich offering and it's just getting better as time goes on adding more and more functionality," says Bernard Weinstein, former president of the sales and trading group at Thomson Financial. It comes closer to what Telerate was before, ironically, than what the Moneyline Telerate is today," he adds.

Thomson Financial sales and trading division now carries some of the same content that Telerate used to exclusively distribute from Cantor. Last November, Moneyline Telerate replaced the Cantor prices with BrokerTec and TradeWeb. As a result of ending the exclusive contract with Cantor, the interdealer broker is free to distribute its prices through ILX Systems, Reuters and Bloomberg.

ILX now has access to four types of Cantor data: Treasuries with active coupons, off-the-runs, interest-rate swaps and European-government bonds. In addition to the Cantor data, Moneyline Telerate has IFR which it gets from Thomson and Dow Jones Capital Markets Report - all three of which are available on FI Focus, points out Weinstein.

In addition, ILX offers prices from Tullett & Tokyo, all the major futures exchanges and ValuBond, an ECN. On the analytics front, FI Focus provides a proprietary search engine caled Bond Scanner and proprietary bond calculator from Trading Investment Program and Systems (TIPS), an industry standard that was recently acquired by BondDesk, a fixed-income ECN.

Weinstein also notes that ILX has a different pricing philosophy than its competitors. "The user can customize the services to their needs so they have a closer fit between their cost and the systems services." Though ILX's roots are in the retail-brokerage arena, FI Focus appeals to a broad range of users, including asset managers and traders, since the Cantor prices are tradable, he says. The fixed-income product is distributed over ILX's professional workstation and is also provided over the Web. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio