The robot is designed to save traders time and beat competitors, a meaningful edge in a secondary market starved of liquidity. It could also be developed using AI to remember the best counterparties for certain trades and target them first in future, a system known as smart order routing, according to Switzer.
In the test cases, AllianceBernstein made three separate trades in investment-grade U.S. corporate bonds with each of the three banks and the firm expects to expand that to more dealers in the coming months. The bots agreed to the transactions on the signal of a human trader.
“The master is telling the dog to fetch and bring the stick back,” said Switzer.
In the future, AllianceBernstein expects the bot to spot the best prices within parameters previously set by a trader and execute automatically. That would mean it would no longer need a human to give the execute command, although to be sure, the firm will still have human checks and balances including compliance.
Citi and Morgan Stanley both expect their trading algorithms to be able to directly handle requests to trade and execute without human command, depending on the nature of the transaction. A spokesman for RBC Capital Markets declined to comment on the trade with AllianceBernstein.
“We’re automating parts of a very manual process,” said Kevin Foley, head of markets electronification at Citi in New York. “Phase two is fully-automated straight-through processing.”
It’s surely a world Bonfire’s bond trader Sherman McCoy would have no place in as the crumbs disintegrate.
“Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn’t bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that,” Wolfe wrote in his novel.
This article provided by Bloomberg News.