Bond venues

Corporate bonds are traditionally traded in minimum amounts of £100k by institutional clients, or the very wealthy. Most bonds aren't traded on exchange, but rather "trade over the counter", which means investors use an institutional broker or global bank to trade corporate bonds.

In 2010 the London Stock Exchange created the Order book for Retail Bonds (ORB). It has the specific aim of creating a bond market open to retail investors and has issued a relatively small number of corporate bonds relative to the institutional bond market. The companies listed on the ORB generally have smaller issue sizes < £100m and are often issued by Small to Medium sized companies.

An alternative to the London ORB is the WiseAlpha Fractional bond trading platform, which was launched in 2016. which fractionalises corporate bonds into small denominations that are affordable for the private investor. Unlike the London ORB, WiseAlpha sells both Institutional and Retail corporate bonds in fractional form for investors to affordably build large, diversified portfolios of the UK's largest companies