ICMA, in collaboration with Propellant, publishes third semi-annual report that provides detailed data on EU and UK bond market trading activity

ICMA has published its third semi-annual report on European Secondary Bond Market Data. Using Propellant’s data analytics solution ICMA’s report provides a detailed and holistic view of bond market trading activity in the EU and UK.

This report demonstrates the power of Propellant’s platform, showing how our clients are able to capture and analyse data from multiple sources to gain meaningful business insights. This level of advanced analytics is available to all our users.

ICMA’s report captures more than 80% of all secondary bond market transactions reported in the EU and UK and is therefore relatively representative of the aggregated bond market data as reported under the MiFID II/MiFIR obligation.

This report, which follows the report published for H2 2023, provides an update after the first full year of bond market data, covering the period of January 2023 through June 2023. The changes and trends relative to past reports can be summarised as follows:



Traded volume for sovereign bonds in H1 2023 increased by 2.7% compared to H1 2022

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For sovereign bonds, average trade sizes decreased between 10% and 37%, depending on the issuing country

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For corporate bonds, average trade sizes decreased from H1 2022 to H1 2023 ranges between 3% and 19%, depending on currency

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The only subclass where the average trade size increased was US issued sovereign debt, as well as USD denominated non sovereign debt

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Trade counts have increased 21% for sovereign bonds and 8% on the credits

complete report