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.
During the first month of 2019, the number of OTC forex margin trading operators registered with the FFAJ was 54. When comparing against the previous month, January had one more operator than December 2018.
Taking a look at OTC FX margin trading, the month of January achieved a trading volume of ¥381.1 trillion ($3.45 trillion). This represents a rise of 30.6 percent when measured against the previous month, which had a trading volume of ¥291.8 trillion.
Trading volumes for the USD/JPY pair, Cross Yen, was ¥342.7 during January of 2019. When comparing this with the previous month, which had a trading volume of ¥253.1 trillion, this is up by 35.4 percent.
Trading volumes for On-Exchange contracts equaled ¥2.4 trillion. This is 17.3 percent more than that achieved in December of 2018, which was ¥2.06 trillion.
Binary Options OTC Volumes Rise in January
Moving over to the monthly retail OTC currency binary options transactions reported by FFAJ members, which consists of eight members, the same as in December, trading volume for January was ¥35 billion.
This is up by around 15.4 percent when compared to December of 2018, which had a trading volume of ¥30.3 billion. The number of accounts also grew in January, with existing accounts rising by 3,975 from 418,239 accounts in the previous month to 422,214 in January.
In terms of active accounts, these were also up on a month-on-month comparison. Specifically, there were 931 more accounts in January, which was 11,132, up from 10,201 in December.
