LiquidityHub (see earlier article) announced late on friday that they are to shut down after only 5 months of trading. The multi-distributor, multi-dealer liquidity aggregator for fixed income markets that was backed by 16 dealer-banks was meant to compete with the likes of Tradeweb by streaming Fixed Income and Swap prices from both Reuters and Bloomberg to facilitate liquidity distribution.

However in a short statement released just before end of trading on Friday, LiquidityHub says it will "cease electronic trading operations from close of business today...the decision has been taken due to recent market conditions which have called into question the current scalability of the LiquidityHub model".

There have been rumours circulating for some time that take-up of the service has been poor and that banks' support for the platform was less than satisfactory. Last year many of the banks involved in the LiquidityHub venture - including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley,JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, RBS and UBS - also acquired a minority stake in the rival TradeWeb platform, which they had originally sold to Thomson Financial in 2004.