The Financial Futures Association of Japan (FFAJ) has released its monthly retail over-the-counter (OTC) volumes report for the month of July 2017, and as expected, trading volumes showed a slight decline as compared to the month of June 2017.
Trading volume dropped by 6.87 per cent from $346 million (38.1 billion yen) in June to $322 million (35.5 billion yen) in July. This is understandable as it is a holiday period in Japan, and with traders travelling or just enjoying their holidays, volumes are predictably lower.
But what should concern the FFAJ is the fact that the volumes dropped by 20.2% from $404 million (44.5 billion yen) to $322 million (35.5 billion yen) as compared to the same month last year. This has been a general trend in 2017 where the binary options market has been losing a bit of its sheen and other instruments like Cryptocurrencies have begun to capture the attention of the market.
The number of trading accounts increased slightly from 3,70,893 accounts in June 2017 to 3,72,820 accounts in July, though active accounts showed a slight drop from 10,892 accounts to 10,524 which is again due to the holiday season in Japan.
When compared to same month last year, the number of total accounts increased 6.5% from 348,508 accounts in July 2016 to 372,820 accounts in July 2017.
Again, the FFAJ would be concerned about the decreasing number of active accounts YoY which decreased from 11,873 accounts in July 2016 to 10,524 accounts in July 2017. We believe that these are early pointers to the decline of the binary options markets and with Bitcoin trading volumes recording some of their highest numbers over the last couple of months, it is an indication of where the wind is headed.
