On July 9, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) issued Regulatory Notice 19-22 (the Notice) requesting comment on a proposal to publish alternative trading system (ATS) volume data for corporate bonds and agency debt securities, in a format similar to that currently published for equity securities. The published data would include both the total number of transactions and aggregate dollar volume traded for transactions in a particular corporate bond or agency debt security executed within the ATS and reported to FINRA during the aggregation period. The ATS data would be aggregated on a monthly basis and published with a three-month delay. FINRA would not charge for the aggregated ATS fixed income data, which would be published on FINRA’s website.

Under the proposal, each ATS self-reports to FINRA its aggregate weekly volume information and number of trades, by security, in corporate and agency debt securities that are TRACE-eligible. Self-reporting by ATSs would occur on a security-by-security basis within seven business days after the end of each week. FINRA would then publish the data as described above. FINRA staff would compare the self-reported ATS volume data with the transaction information firms report to TRACE to verify the accuracy of volume and trade counts, and once it is comfortable with relying on trade reporting data to calculate the volume, it would eliminate the self-reporting requirement and derive the published data directly from the transaction information reported to TRACE. The Notice also includes a series of specific questions for which FINRA is seeking feedback. FINRA will consider alternatives based on feedback to the proposal.

In the Notice, FINRA encourages all interested parties to comment on the proposal to publish the ATS data by September 7.

A full copy of the Notice is available here.