Average daily volumes on spot FX broking platform EBS increased 60% year on year to $214.9 billion (single count) in May. Compared with April’s average daily volumes, which were a still impressive $154.2 billion, the new figure is staggering.
Almost as impressive were the figures reported this morning by Thomson Reuters although its figures are for the full suite of ‘Thomson Reuters Dealing, Matching and Reuters Trading for FX’. Average daily volumes for May were in excess of $186 billion, an increase of 35% over April’s figures and 65% higher than in May 2009.
CLS told us this week that Tuesday June 1 had been a record day. It successfully settled 1,758,902 instructions, with the total value settled at $5.688 trillion. This beats its previous record of 1,733,262, settled on February 16 2010.
Rob Close, CEO of CLS Group and president and CEO of CLS Bank International, said: “This record follows a significant surge in trading volumes since the beginning of May as a result of market volatility, and the UK and US public holidays yesterday. In May CLS Bank settled an average of 1,056,558 instructions per day, with an average daily value of $4.229 trillion.”
The US had a public/bank holiday on Monday, which would mean both Thursday and Friday’s instructions for most USD pairs would have been settled on Tuesday. If average daily values in May were $4.229 trillion, one could expect the figure on Tuesday to have been much higher, with two days-worth of instructions being settled. But the value shows that most traders probably took Friday off.
CME FX volumes averaged a record 1.3 million contracts per day in May, reflecting an average daily volume of $161 billion. The number of contracts is up 140% since the same period last year (FX volumes steady).
Several individual FX contracts achieved record average daily volume in May, including Australian dollar futures, British pound futures, Canadian dollar futures, E-mini euro FX futures, E-mini Japanese yen futures, euro FX futures, euro FX options and E-micro euro-US dollar futures.
This comes as little surprise as US regulators attempt to push more OTC trade on to exchanges to reduce counterparty risk (Is counterparty risk a worry?).
