Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE), a leading operator of global exchanges and clearing houses and provider of data and listings services, today announced that ICE Bonds has completed its integration with BlackRock’s Aladdin, offering access to ICE Bonds’ Portfolio Auction functionality, an automated execution protocol for portfolio trading.
Aladdin is a premier portfolio management system for investment managers that combines sophisticated risk analytics with comprehensive trading and position monitoring tools.
ICE Bonds’ Portfolio Auction allows investment managers the ability to auction a portfolio of bonds on an all-or-nothing basis to one or multiple platform participants in a discrete, pre-determined period of time. Portfolios may consist of any number of individual bonds and may be all buys or all sells or a combination of both. Portfolio Auction offers two distinct trading session formats, At-the-Market or At-the-Close, giving investment managers the ability to leverage either ICE Data Services’ Continuous Evaluated Pricing (CEP) or End-of-Day Evaluations. By connecting with Blackrock’s Aladdin, investment managers can now seamlessly access and execute orders using the ICE Bonds Portfolio Auction, reducing operational risk and increasing workflow efficiencies.
“In the past, portfolio trading has largely been a manual process, with no standardization, which is time consuming for all participants. By bringing this protocol together with our ICE Data Services’ Continuous Evaluated Prices, portfolio managers can execute as close as possible to NAV prices, significantly reducing tracking errors against benchmarks,” said Marshall Nicholson, President of ICE Bonds. “The addition of this auction protocol to ICE Bonds’ existing RFQ and Central Order Book protocols will give traders a more efficient method to buy or sell a basket of bonds, which compliments the workflow of the ICE ETF Hub, our innovative, open architecture solution supporting the primary market for ETF trading.”
ICE Bonds offers trading solutions for Corporates, Municipals, Treasuries, Agencies, Structured Products and Certificates of Deposit. Customers can also leverage the continuous and end-of-day fixed income pricing and analytics offered by ICE Data Services, which is already available to customers over Aladdin.