Following a disappointing performance in February, 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 March of 2019.
In the third month of this year, 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.
During the month of March, the OTC trading volume of Tokyo Financial Exchange (TFX) was ¥287.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion). When measuring this against the previous month, it is up by 17.38 percent.
Moving on to the USD/JPY pair, Cross Yen, the trading volume reported for the month of February was ¥249.4 trillion. Similar to OTC trading volumes, when comparing this figure against that achieved in February (¥212.7 trillion), it represents an increase of 17.22 percent.
The trading volume for on-exchange contracts during the month also looks strong on a month-on-month comparison, climbing by 12.89 percent from ¥1.76 trillion in February to ¥1.98 trillion in March.
Binary Options Recover from February Lows, FFAJ Reports
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 trading activity for binary options increased during March.
In February of 2019, the trading volume for binary options, similar to FX, was weak during the month. However, in March, the FFAJ has reported a slight uptick in trading, although, it is still not back to January’s levels.
Specifically, trading volume in March for binary options reached ¥31.8 billion. From February’s trading volume of ¥29.3 billion, March’s figure has increased by 8.5 percent. However, it is still lower than the ¥35 billion achieved in January of 2019.
