Competitive Bid: Leveraging Real-Time Trading Data

Competitive Bid: Leveraging Real-Time Trading Data

Rebecca Branca 
Product Specialist, Data & Analytics Solutions

April 20, 2023

Kickstarting in mid-March 2023, NGT, EquiLend’s renowned trading platform, launched an exciting new workflow for clients – Competitive Bid. In an effort to drive greater automation in the specials market, Competitive Bid allows both Lenders and Borrowers to indicate hard-to-borrow flags when they initiate trades. Users can access Competitive Bid through a new screen within the current NGT UI or by ingesting a fully automated solution in their prop system. While in the Competitive Bid screen, users also have the benefit of viewing securities and assets that have been marked as “competitive” from other parties. Since its launch, 72% of Competitive Bid trades have been executed at rates greater than 300 bps!
 
Outside of a new trade initiation type, Competitive Bid leverages the technology of the EquiLend Data & Analytics suite to integrate data from across the wider EquiLend product suite, which covers the complete trade and regulatory lifecycle. Alongside a list of their active orders, users can compare their book to recent transaction level metrics provided by NGT, including the ability to view the Highest Bid and Lowest Offer submitted via Competitive Bid for a given security today. Piped in directly from EquiLend’s Post-Trade Suite, users can also view their open contracts, outstanding quantities and weighted average fees with each counterpart on competitively listed securities.
 
To provide greater market transparency, Competitive Bid leverages data from two Data & Analytics solutions: DataLend and Real-Time Data. The DataLend data supplies Competitive Bid users with unparalleled insights into inventory availability, upcoming corporate events and industry utilization on a security level basis to allow for greater control over their trading decisions. Additionally, the Real-Time dataset allows users to be better informed and enhance their trading decisions intraday by showcasing the latest executed trades across the industry along with the current Lender-to-Broker benchmark rate.

At a glance, the release of Competitive Bid demonstrates EquiLend’s understanding of the necessity for innovation in the securities lending space. With the development of Competitive Bid coming to fruition, the project also highlights the importance and advantage of integrating the many solutions found here at EquiLend for our team and especially our end users. As momentum for Competitive Bid continues to build, our mission continues to be the close monitoring of the growing wants and needs of our clients to drive innovation across EquiLend.

About DataLend

DataLend, the market data service within EquiLend’s Data & Analytics Solutions group, tracks daily market movements across more than 62,000 unique securities in the $2.5 trillion securities finance market. www.datalend.com

About EquiLend

EquiLend is a global financial technology firm offering Trading, Post-Trade, Data & Analytics, RegTech and Platform Solutions for the securities finance industry. EquiLend has offices in North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific and is regulated in jurisdictions around the globe.  www.equilend.com