Fidelity Institutional has announced the launch of Fidelity Bond Beacon, a comprehensive, fully digital fixed income trading solution that helps advisors manage all aspects of individual fixed income investing for their clients. This solution brings together a range of features that advisors seek in building and managing fixed income portfolios. Bond Beacon: 

• helps guide better outcomes by supporting intermediary bond trading and bond management from start to finish;
• features advanced portfolio management capabilities and tools to support firms’ execution quality management;
• offers institutional grade liquidity delivered by Fidelity Capital Markets’ open architecture brokerage technology, which gives advisors greater access to the broad fixed income market;
• allows Fidelity to continuously increase the tradeable universe available;
• strengthens price efficiency and enables advisors to act on changes in market structure; and
• is integrated with Wealthscape, Fidelity’s advisor technology platform.

“For years, the industry has been working toward digitizing fixed income investing, and we believe Bond Beacon takes a leap forward in delivering that to our customers, offering an unmatched experience,” said Renzo Iturrino, head of fixed income product solutions for Fidelity Institutional’s Capital Markets group. “The three primary benefits to advisors are that it brings together all of their fixed income needs in one simple platform, it gives them access to a much broader range of offerings than before, and it offers competitive prices through greater depth, which we’re able to achieve as the only major clearing and custody firm with an in-house institutional fixed income trading capability for advisors. That allows us to consistently deliver value back to our customers.” 

In addition to offering access to a broad and evolving trade universe, Bond Beacon helps advisors work more efficiently by enabling them to navigate the full fixed income experience (including pre-trade, at-trade and post-trade activity) alongside other Wealthscape activity. Advisors can manage their existing holdings or portfolios as well as construct new ones, analyze and interact with the market from multiple launch points, and manage order flow all in one place through an easy-to-use interface. Additional features include:

• Advanced portfolio management, construction and analytics, including advisor-driven, institutional grade portfolio construction with the ability for an advisor to incorporate all client fixed income holdings at Fidelity and manage important portfolio events. Advisors can create portfolios from their own defined criteria and view proposed bond offerings that adhere to executable quantities and minimum increment sizes.
• Risk analytics, conditional market scenarios and risk modeling informed by Fidelity research and supported by machine learning technologies that enable enhanced understanding of the impact of market stress on investments. This helps advisors make better informed decisions when building and rebalancing portfolios.
• Post-trade reporting with portfolio analytics, including consolidated views for pre-trade, trade and post-trade workflow.

How Bond Beacon is Meeting Advisor Needs

            Following a pilot, Bond Beacon is rolling out to Fidelity Institutional clients. Early adopters reported that they value the liquidity available in the solution, the integration of holdings views with execution workflows, the platform’s portfolio construction capabilities, and Bond Beacon’s simple and intuitive interface.   

 “Bond Beacon helps our team work much more efficiently because we’re able to quickly access the broad market and get the latest details on a wide range of fixed income offerings, and then use that knowledge to take action right within the platform,” said Alan Rosenfield, chief investment officer for Harmony Asset Management. “The depth of liquidity and easy navigation make it simple to find the information we need and to compare offerings, and having everything in one place streamlines the whole trading process.”

Fidelity’s Overall Fixed Income Offering for Advisors

            Bond Beacon expands on Fidelity’s existing capabilities for advisors in the fixed income space. In January 2020, Fidelity launched a new suite of bond model portfolios, including four fixed income strategies leveraging both mutual funds and ETFs. The bond model portfolios offer a range of risk profiles for advisors who are looking for strategies that can serve as — or complement — the fixed income allocations in their clients’ portfolios. 

In 2019, Fidelity launched the Fixed Income Portfolio Review diagnostic tool, which uses comprehensive holdings-level data to help advisors and investors understand detailed sector allocations within their fixed income mutual funds and ETFs, enabling them to make informed decisions about their bond positioning in the context of their overall portfolio. 

For more information about Bond Beacon, please visit go.fidelity.com/bondbeacon. More information about Fidelity’s approach to advanced analytics and how analytical techniques may help advisors and investors deepen their understanding of investment risk management is available in this white paper: “A Fidelity Approach to Providing Advanced Risk Analytics for Investors”