Bloomberg’s Portfolio Trading Basket Builder (‘Basket Builder’, PTBB <GO>) integrates the data, analytics, communication tools, and pricing power of the Bloomberg Terminal into a single package that’s specifically built for fixed income traders and portfolio managers. The Basket Builder allows buy-side and sell-side to create the optimal basket of bonds before execution. From spreadsheets, order management systems or Bloomberg monitors or functions, traders can create portfolios, have them reviewed pre-trade by prospective dealers to ensure the securities are available and at satisfactory prices, analyze those quotes, and compare them against market references and benchmarks. Once the optimal basket is created, traders can easily move to execute the trade, on an all-or-none basis, via Bloomberg BOLT, where up to six dealers can be put in competition. Once the trade is complete, straight-through processing allows risk and p/l to be immediately updated without the potential for erroneous manual calculation and booking. This also simplifies and helps to manage reporting processes.
Bloomberg’s offering adds further value by also enabling dealer quotes to be spread to references such as Bloomberg’s Evaluated Pricing service (BVAL). This is in addition to other market standard quote types and references. This can help buy-side traders and portfolio managers better manage performance tracking error to their benchmarks and end of day closes.