Seeking Best Execution Across the Globe: How Automated Time-Release Trading is Making Markets More Accessible

For all the talk of electronic trading breaking down geographic boundaries to enable truly seamless global execution, there's always been one dirty little secret keeping cross-border traders up at night. If you wanted to ensure best execution or match benchmark pricing for a specific index, you needed to be able to execute the trade at a specific time of day - usually at or near the close - in each local market.

So, while it was theoretically possible to trade U.S. Treasuries from Europe or the Asia Pacific region, just as easily as it would be from Wall Street, the cross-border trade came with the side effect of blurry eyes and late nights (or early mornings) spent sweating details around the 4:00 PM ET market close.

Pick Your Spot

Today, thanks to widespread use of the time-release feature on Tradeweb's Automated Intelligent Execution (AiEX) tool, cross-border traders are now able to pre-plan and set up trade execution for specific times of day in non-local trading hours, optimizing best execution without being glued to a screen in the middle of the night. Our time-release feature works by allowing users to set detailed parameters for a trade, including the specific time of day at which it will be released to the market, at which point an electronic request-for-quote (RFQ) is automatically sent to dealers. Once responses come back, the trade is automatically executed at the best price using AiEX technology. With that single automated workflow, the client is able to field an RFQ at the optimal point in the local market trading day, receive competing quotes, select the best one, execute the trade and seamlessly process all of the related closing and settlement details without even being awake.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the functionality has rapidly gained a following among traders working across time zones to pick their spot in local markets. Over the past five years, for those looking to access U.S. Treasuries during U.S. market hours, we've seen a 10-fold increase in volume in time-release trading via AiEX, with some 40 firms now using the capability.

Similarly, we've seen more than an 8x increase in the number of European government bond trades executed using the functionality, through the first quarter of 2025. The number of clients using it in European government bond trading has also grown to nearly 40.

Timing is Everything

Increasingly, as we see the time-release capability get used more frequently, we're also seeing its use cases expand dramatically. While many Tradeweb clients are simply using the functionality to optimize relatively vanilla trades in line with local market closes, others are starting to use it as a more strategic part of their overall approach to cross-border trading. In one example, a U.S.-based hedge fund is using time-release to create a swap strategy trading U.S. Treasuries during peak Asia market hours. In another example, a major UK-based asset manager is using time-release to stage thousands of European government bond orders in line with the London market close and thousands of U.S. Treasury orders targeting the U.S. market close. We're also seeing the capability used within systematic trading, whereby quantitative investment strategy (QIS) desks are now automating timed hedges during global market hours. Previously, a strategy like this would require traders to execute trades manually in the morning, local time, in Asia and in afternoon in the U.S., but now they are able to fully automate and streamline that workflow on a truly global basis.

In each of these use cases, and countless others playing out across the globe, Tradeweb clients are finding that the ability to pinpoint the optimal moment to put their trade in competition is giving them a new edge in markets that were once too logistically complex to access effectively.

Time-release is not just limited to rates products either. A large APAC asset manager looking to streamline their trading activity in U.S. and European credit markets incorporated time-release functionality to send hundreds of orders targeting the EU and U.S. close.

The feature has also found fans among market participants seeking to buttress their cross-border strategies against the increased market volatility we've experienced surrounding new U.S. trade policies and the rapid-fire, sometimes overnight, introduction and removal of tariffs on imported goods. While we initially thought this period of heightened uncertainty might drive a slowdown in AiEX trading, we found the opposite to be true. By allowing users to set detailed parameters for each trade and only executing those trades once those parameters were hit, AiEX allowed asset managers to create multiple trade scenarios during their normal workday, effectively making them ready to seize on any conceivable outcome that might occur during local market hours. As a result, instead of slowing, AiEX volume using time-release continued to grow during this period.

Making the World Smaller One Innovation at a Time

Best of all, because AiEX can be integrated directly into Tradeweb clients' Python environments, or via clients' own proprietary Excel spreadsheets using the Tradeweb Integrator Excel plugin, these types of fully-automated, precision-timed trades can be executed outside of legacy order management systems - creating a direct pipeline from trade strategy to execution.

Together, this seamless integration combined with tools that make it possible to be in the right place at the right time, 24 hours a day, are breaking down silos and artificial boundary lines that used to make it more difficult than it needed to be to truly trade globally.

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