What does a 25-year-old know about trading bonds?

Maybe enough to help one investing giant solve a problem that Wall Street can't seem to get its head around.

BlackRock, which manages $4.6 trillion in assets, has a team of young traders thinking of ways to apply electronic trading to markets where it's not yet prevalent.

The program pairs young workers who are more adept at using technology — the firm calls them "medium-experienced" — with more experienced hands who know how to do things the old-fashioned way.

Supurna VedBrat, BlackRock's deputy head of trading, says the idea is to bring some new thinking to the table.

"Your 25-year-old may come up with a brilliant idea that somebody with 20 years' experience may not come up with just because they've been so attuned to the status quo," said VedBrat, who is also cohead of electronic trading and market structure.

"We have a nice combination of experience and young talent driving some of the change."

'Creating another channel of liquidity'The status quo has already been upended in stock and derivatives markets. But one place where the switch to electronic trading is proving a challenge across Wall Street is corporate bonds.

That's because the bond market is more fragmented.

Think of it this way: If you want to buy common shares of Ford Motor, you can buy only one kind of stock. Its ticker is F, and there are always people looking to sell. But if you want to buy Ford Motor's bonds, there are many more to choose from, and for any individual bond there may not be enough people ready to sell to you.

In other words, filling an order to buy or sell bonds takes work. Iseult Conlin, a 29-year-old corporate bond trader at BlackRock, explained:

"The way that corporate bonds trade historically has been very relationship-driven — very over-the-counter, pick-up-the-phone, and dealer-quote oriented, where the informational advantage and inventory of bonds was very much with the broker-dealers."

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