Buying a Bond: Analog Edition
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Buying a Bond: Digital Edition
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Analysts provide quantitative research and qualitative fundamental research.
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A series of screens filter the fixed-income universe for bonds that meet certain parameters.
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Portfolio managers go back and forth with analysts to determine if specific bonds are a good investment or not. The process can take hours or even days.
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The portfolio manager (PM) chooses the bonds he or she wants to buy and his or her team will manually build the order.
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A trader calls several different brokers to see if the bonds the PM wants to buy are available in sufficient quantity and at an acceptable price.
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More discussions between analysts, traders and PMs can delay the trade even further or scrap it altogether.
A credit rating and scoring system.
Quantitative assessment tools are used alongside fundamental and liquidity analysis tools.
A dashboard that aggregates multiple external fixed-income trading platforms in one place.
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Fundamental analysts give quantitative ratings across several different parameters that anyone on the investment team can easily access and compare. The entire investment team can also access a dashboard with multiple feeds of liquidity information.
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Abbie: A virtual assistant that can do everything from building trades to suggesting potential investments.
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The PM does the higher-order thinking that humans do best. He or she reviews the list of bonds, considers the overall composition of the portfolio, long-term trends and other factors, and chooses the most attractive options.
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Once a PM makes his or her determinations, Abbie can build the order in seconds, without the fat-thumb errors even the most diligent human makes every so often.