Tradeweb’s Monthly Activity Report, which captures trading activity in fixed income, derivatives and ETF markets, showed average daily volumes of $592.4 billion for the month of September 2018, a 27.5% increase over the same period in 2017 and a 19.5% increase over August 2018 totals. This is the highest monthly volume ever recorded by Tradeweb. Year-to-date trading volume on the Tradeweb platform has now surpassed the $100 trillion mark, topping Tradeweb’s total volume for 2017.

The following is a break-out of the most noteworthy trends from September 2018:

§  Rising Gov’t Bond Yields Fuel Surge in Trading: Tradeweb’s record September volumes were fueled in large part by a 24.7% year-over-year increase in U.S. Government Bond trading volume and a 20.3% year-over-year increase in European Government Bond trading volume. This surge coincided with increasing government bond yields in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. 5 Year Treasury bond hit 2.98%, its highest level since September 2008, the U.K. 10 Year Gilt rose to 1.63% and the Italian 10 Year BTP finished the month closing up 27 basis points in a single day.

§  U.S. High-Grade Credit and Repo Also See Record Volume: Average daily trading volume in U.S. high-grade credit crested the $2 billion/day threshold for the first time in September, with Tradeweb’s fully electronic high-grade volumes representing 3.8% of total TRACE volume for the month. The growth of trading in repurchase agreements (Repo) continued its recent growth trend, setting a record of $164.5 billion in average daily volume on Tradeweb, the highest volume recorded since 2011.

§  Automated Trading Grows, Led by ETF Market: Tradeweb’s AiEX (Automated Intelligent Execution) accounted for a meaningful percentage of activity in the institutional markets for U.S. Treasuries, European government bonds, U.S. high-grade, European credit and U.S. and European ETFs. The adoption of automated trading is most pronounced in the ETF market where 40% of total tickets processed in September were executed via the AiEX tool.

§  Credit Derivatives Volume Grows, Spurred by New Tech: New technology developed by Tradeweb to streamline CDS trading by enabling clients to execute multiple, same direction orders as a single, aggregated ticket helped drive year-over-year volume growth of 17% in credit derivatives.

The full Tradeweb Monthly Activity Report for September 2018 is available here: https://www.tradeweb.com/market_activity_reports/