GlobeNewswire Inc | Nov 23, 2020 09:20AM EST

November 23, 2020

NEW YORK, Nov. 23, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Virtu Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ: VIRT) and MarketAxess Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTX), each a global leader in electronic trading and analytics, today announced leading exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuers Charles Schwab Investment Management, Inc. and WisdomTree Asset Management, Inc. as new clients of Virtus eNAV ETF analytics tool enhanced with MarketAxess award-winning Composite+, an AI-powered algorithmic pricing engine for corporate and emerging market bonds.

Rolled-out in 1Q 2020, Virtus eNAV ETF analytics tool offers real-time transparency for ETF valuations by calculating the bid and ask prices of ETFs based on their underlying components and/or proxy assets. As a complement,Composite+ combines both public (US TRACE) and proprietary MarketAxess data to produce an unbiased, two-sided market for more than 28,000 instruments globally. Updated every 15 to 60 seconds (depending on the liquidity of the instrument), theComposite+ engine generates nearly 30 million levels per day covering 90-95% of trading activity in its markets.

We are excited that major ETF issuers understand and value the many benefits eNAV delivers, said Douglas Cifu, Co-Founder and CEO of Virtu Financial.By joining forces with MarketAxess we are empowering issuers to better understand market value and reliably monitor their ETFs in support of high quality and efficient execution by their investors. As long-time advocates for transparency, we believe eNAV will provide even greater clarity in ETF secondary market pricing and become the industry standard.

Virtus eNAV supports a variety of trading functions including pre-trade price discovery and execution consultation, liquidity provision, post-trade transaction cost analysis, auto-execution and crossing. Coverage includes US-listed ETFs with domestic and international equities, commodity and fixed income holdings and can facilitate many use cases such as:

-- Monitoring and analyzing real-time bid-ask prices (updated as underlying components do) as well as real-time fair value pricing for ETF components trading outside of US time zones -- Quote size analysis of both ETF secondary market liquidity and underlying component liquidity that demonstrates in much greater detail depth of market for each ETF -- Profiling liquidity and comparing ETFs with same investment objectives

We are excited to leverage our award-winning data product,Composite+ as part of our partnership with Virtu to bring real-time pricing accuracy and transparency to the fixed income ETF marketplace said Chris Concannon, President and COO of MarketAxess. As institutional investors increasingly adopt ETFs as portfolio tools, real-time portfolio pricing will be essential for execution efficiency.

The eNAV ETF streaming product featuring MarketAxess Composite+ is accessible via Virtus online client Portal which includes access to a streaming API.

About Virtu Financial, Inc. About MarketAxessVirtu is a leading provider of MarketAxess operates a leading,financial services and products that institutional electronic tradingleverages cutting-edge technology to platform delivering expandeddeliver liquidity to the global markets liquidity opportunities, improvedand innovative, transparent trading execution quality and significantsolutions to its clients. Leveraging cost savings across globalits global market making expertise and fixed-income markets. A globalinfrastructure, Virtu provides a robust network of over 1,700 firms,product suite including offerings in including the world?s leading assetexecution, liquidity sourcing, managers and institutionalanalytics and broker-neutral, broker-dealers, leveragesmulti-dealer platforms in workflow MarketAxess? patented tradingtechnology. Virtu?s product offerings technology to efficiently tradeallow clients to trade on hundreds of bonds. MarketAxess? award-winningvenues across 50+ countries and in Open Trading? marketplace is regardedmultiple asset classes, including as the preferred all-to-all tradingglobal equities, ETFs, foreign solution in the global creditexchange, futures, fixed income and markets, creating a unique liquiditymyriad other commodities. In addition, pool for a broad range of creditVirtu?s integrated, multi-asset market participants. Drawing on itsanalytics platform provides a range of deep data and analytical resources,pre and post-trade services, data MarketAxess provides automatedproducts and compliance tools that trading solutions, market dataclients rely upon to invest, trade and products and a range of pre- andmanage risk across global markets. post-trade services.

Virtu Financial is headquartered in New MarketAxess is headquartered in NewYork and has offices in Toronto, York and has offices in London,Dublin, London, Madrid, Paris, Austin, Amsterdam, Boston, Chicago, LosBoston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Angeles, Miami, Salt Lake City, SanFrancisco, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Francisco, So Paulo, Hong Kong andSingapore, and Sydney. Singapore.

For more information, please visit For more information, please visitwww.virtu.com or contact www.marketaxess.com.info@virtu.com.

Contact: Investor Relations Media RelationsDeborah Belevan, IRC, CPA Andrew Smithinvestor_relations@virtu.com media@virtu.com