Following on from January’s solid performance, the Financial Futures Association of Japan (FFAJ) has published its monthly trading volumes for retail foreign Exchange (Forex ) margin trading operators, as well as the trading volumes for its retail over the counter (OTC) binary options dealers for February of 2019.
During the second month of 2019, the number of OTC forex margin trading operators registered with the FFAJ was 54. When comparing this against the previous month, this is the same amount of operators and should, therefore, not have any bearing on the results.
Throughout February, the total OTC FX Margin trading was ¥245.2 trillion ($2.2 trillion). While this might seem like a large trading volume, it is actually 35.7 percent less than that achieved in the previous month, which was ¥381.1 trillion.
Moving on to the USD/JPY pair, Cross Yen, the trading volume reported for the month of February was ¥212.8 trillion. Similar to OTC trading volumes, when measured against January, this is down by 37.9 percent.
The trading volumes for on-exchange contracts does not look much better in February, with trading volumes falling by 27.5 percent from ¥2.4 trillion in January of 2019 down to ¥1.76 trillion in February.
Binary Options Volumes for FFAJ Members Fall in February
Taking a look at binary options, which combines the trading volumes achieved by the eight FFAJ members including GMO Click Securities Co, it appears that February was also a week month for the financial instrument.
Specifically, the trading volume was ¥29.3 billion during the month. When comparing this against January, which reported a trading volume of ¥35 billion, this represents a fall of 1.6 percent.
This drop in trading volumes could be the result of a decline in the number of active accounts. Although the number of existing accounts increased by 1,697 month-on-month to reach 423,911, the number of active accounts fell from 11,132 in January down to 10,610 last month.
