Price Discovery in the Dual-Platform US Treasury Market

Inter-dealer trading in US Treasury Securities is almost equally divided between two similar electronic trading platforms. BrokerTec is more active in the trading of 2-, 5-, and 10-year T-notes while eSpeed has more active trading in the 30-year bond. eSpeed provides a more pre-trade transparent platform than BrokerTec. We examine the contribution to ‘price discovery' of activity in the two platforms using high frequency data. We find that price discovery does not derive equally from the two platforms and that the shares vary across term to maturity. This can be traced to differential trading activities and transparency of the two platforms