FX market round up: Volume turned down

Data released by Icap, CME and CLS all provide support for what market participants have been saying for the past few weeks – liquidity is drying up. Daily turnover on Icap’s EBS platform averaged $167 billion, a fall of around 32% from November 2007 and from October 2008. Similarly, the CME saw turnover in its futures and options average 471,000 contracts a day, down 26% on November 2007. Elsewhere, CLS says it settled a daily average of 588,416 instructions with a value of $3.25 trillion. In comparison, it settled 727,934 instructions in October and 488,000 deals in November 2007. Of course, November 2007 was an exceptionally busy month, which has probably exaggerated the severity of the annualized decline.