New Year atmosphere took its toll even on the biggest Forex market players. Some of them needed a really long time to publish reports and their monthly volumes. At long last, all of them presented statements summarizing turnovers and volumes in December – so I can give back this article in your hands 🙂
As usually, the whole post is divided into two parts. Today, we will look at companies like CME Group, Saxo Bank, Thomson Reuters and GMO Click. For tomorrow we leave ourselves Monex Capital, GAIN, FXCM and ICAP. Stay tuned and follow comparic.pl tomorrow really carefully in search of part two!
CME Group
As usual, CME Group was one of the first companies reporting its results of the previous month. A strongly diversified derivatives provider reported on January 3, that it achieved ADV indicator at 10,9 million contracts – this is 13% more when compared with December 2012. A whole month has brought more than 228 million contracts (10% more MoM). It is worth noting that the full-year volume also increased by 10%, compared to the prior period.
The FX average daily volume in December increased from 88 billion to 92 billion USD – an average of 760 thousands contracts per day (8% less than in December). However, a significant increase was recorded in FX options volumes – the yearly scale went up by 20%.
The most popular currency pair was obviously Eurodollar. In its case, the daily volume achieved 2 million contracts level. It is a significant increase compared to the previous year (over 51%). We see even better statistics in the case of EUR/USD options – 623 thousand of contracts per day – 142% more YoY.
Last month, there was much talk about higher fees, which are charged to CME customers. There is a risk, that this could have a negative impact on liquidity – especially that competition is trying to lower the prices in order to attract additional flows. FX market rate for each contract in August 2013 was on 0,808 level – in the followed months it was gradually increasing and now stopped at 0,833.
Saxo Bank
With its headquarters in Danish Copenhagen – Saxo Bank – has published its own report summarizing December and the whole year 2013 just few days after the CME Group. Over the past several months, the overall volumes exceeded 3,5 trillion dollars and ADV was 10,7 billion dollars (about 300 million less than in November).
Throughout December, the total volumes amounted to 235 billion USD ant the amount of client margin deposits surpassed 8 billion dollars, stabilizing at 8.2 billion dollars (in November it was 7.83 billion).
Although from the beginning of the year Saxo Bank is in a strong downward trend in terms of the value of the monthly volume, the 2014 is expected to bring big changes. Broker intends to expand its services in Asia and open for entirely new markets. Will it bring better results? To answer that question we will have to wait for quarterly reports.
Thomson Reuters
In mid-December the Thomson Reuters report was published. Although such a long delay might be firstly surprising, after reading the summary of the publication it became totally understandable. Thomson Reuters FX volumes fell to the lowest point in history (compared to other Decembers). Really skinny month affected not only the FX Spot – broker’s trading platform but also subsidiary company FXall.
ADV for FX Spot was only 92 billion dollars. This is the lowest volume since January 2010, when company started publishing its financial results. This represents a fall of over 11% month-over-month and by 10% year-over-year.
December usually is a slow month for all kind of financial services – especially Forex – but in the case of Thomson Reuters we are talking about problems which started several months ago. Already in October, broker reached record lows and scored 97 billion USD average daily volumes – it was the first time when ADV went below the 100 billion level.
As for the FXall, the average daily volume fell 7% MoM to 110 billion USD level. The only good news in the Thomson Reuters report is the annual rate of ADV for 2013. In the case of FXall it was 108 billion dollars. Subsidiary company saw here an increase of 17% YoY and 30% comparing to 2011.
GMO Click
At the beginning of 2013 we could see a huge daily variations in the case of the Japanese yen. In next quarters the situation began to change and currency was recording highest highs. But know we can see that situation may look similar to that from year ago. Throughout December, yen remained above 100.00 level – this led to speculations indicating a further weakening of Japanese currency and the USDJPY movement towards the 110.00 level. As it turns out, this was reflected positively on the brokers situation – yen volumes at the end of the year had in fact a clear upward trend.
This can be seen especially in the report of the largest retail FX broker in the world (by volumes) – GMO Click. December volumes went up by 10% YoY and reached 572 billion dollars. Finally it allowed to break over five-month declines which culmination took place in November. While these values are still far from the record-breaking performance at the first half of the 2013, Japanese brokers have many reasons to rejoice – they surely expect much better year 2014.
Tomorrow I will publish the second part of the largest brokers volumes summary. For the record – in the afternoon look for next batch of key information from broker’s December reports prepared by comparic.com. We will scan through GAIN Capital, FXCM, ICAP, Monex and KCG Hotspot!
