April was a tough month for trading providers in the foreign exchange (Forex ) space, driven by low Liquidity , which has seen many brokers report low trading volumes. This Monday, the Financial Futures Association of Japan (FFAJ) has published its trading volumes for April, revealing a similar pattern.
Specifically, the regulator has published the 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 April of 2019.
In April 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.
Taking a look at the results, the OTC trading volume of the Tokyo Financial Exchange (TFX) for April was ¥235.5 trillion ($2.14 trillion). When comparing this against the previous month, it is lower by 18.21 percent.
The trading volume for the USD/JPY pair, Cross Yen, also didn’t fare well during April on TFX. This is because trading volumes fell by 18.43 percent from March’s volume, to reach ¥203.4 trillion.
The trading volume for on-exchange contracts in April was even weaker than OTC volumes, at ¥1.5 trillion. When comparing this with the ¥1.98 trillion trading volume in March, it has declined by 26.64 percent.
FFAJ: Binary Options Volume Falls 17.63% MoM
Moving on to binary options, which combines the trading volumes achieved by the eight FFAJ members including GMO Click Securities Co, it appears that trading activity for binary options was also lackluster in the fourth month of 2019.
The trading volume for binary options in April was ¥26.2 billion. Considering that March had a trading volume of ¥31.8 billion, last month’s figure is lower by 17.63 percent month-on-month.
