Here are some statistics from the recent Celent report on US Corporate bond trading.
- As of January 2013, holdings of corporate bond inventories at the 21 dealers that trade with the Federal Reserve have declined by 74% to $56.4 billion since the 2007 peak.
- Only 30 bonds a day have more than five trades on either side in institutional size with names changing all the time due to new issues, according to MarketAxess.
- According to ITB, since 2009 odd lots/super-odd lots notional (US$100K–$1M) have seen an increase in daily notional volume of 33%.
- There has been only a modest increase in ADV (up 6%) for trade size US$1M–$25M since 2009.
- Average trade size on RFQ platforms (i.e., MarketAxess) has been declining 5–6% per year.
- Average trade size on MarketAxess high grade is now ~$400K.
- In the US, corporate bonds volumes compiled with TRACE data are only slightly up year on year at just under $12 billion of average daily volume, and it has been rather stable for the past four years
I've integrated some platform specific statistics from Celent into the listing of electronic venues
