Hello and Happy New Year! A new voice is being added to the Bonds blog – mine!
Let me introduce myself – I’m Helen Barounis, and I joined the Fixed Income team in September 2007, although I’ve been around the place for a lot longer than that. I started out with the Arca group back in 2000 first as a product trainer and customer relationship manager, and then moved into the realm of Market Data. Of course we’ve morphed into this new entity – NYSE Euronext over the time I’ve been here. When I heard they were forming a team for the Fixed Income side, it was natural that they could use my help!

I’m the Product Specialist for our group – so I’ll be around to help manage access, training, usability and connectivity issues that go with any kind of connectivity to the NYSE Bonds platform. With that, I hope to keep you in the know on any new developments we have on our platform, on any GUIs or third party apps you can use to connect to us, or any other relevant information on our bond market.

I did mention “news”, so on the news front, we have a few new developments.

First, the SEC has approved our new rate structure. We are reducing the transaction fees charged to liquidity takers by creating a staggered fee schedule based on the number of bonds traded. Currently, the fee for hitting/taking bonds is 50 cents per bond; that will stay the same for transactions of up to 10 bonds. For transactions of 11 to 25 bonds, the fee goes down to 20 cents per bond, and for transactions of 26 bonds or more, the fee goes down to 10 cents per bond. In addition, there will be a $100 cap per transaction. The new rate structure should help firms offset the costs of small bond executions. Oh and the new rates are in effect as of today!

Also, we are in final testing mode with the Kestral web-based front end for entering orders to the NYSE Bonds platform and hope to make it available to customers in the next month or so. In addition, we are working with Bloomberg to provide a liquidity taking piece on the Bloomberg TOMS. And if you haven’t noticed, we’re providing some real-time Bonds quotes/prices on our website – you can take a look by accessing http://viewbondsnyse.sytes.net/ (the link can also be found on our NYSE Bonds page at http://www.nyse.com/bonds.

We should have more news for you in the coming months – stay tuned, and I look forward to any questions or comments you may have!