Another month is over and that means brokers' trading volumes are pouring into the Finance Magnates inbox. This Tuesday, Japan's largest retail broker, GMO Click, released its trading volumes on the great world wide web.
In the foreign Exchange (FX) markets, things were positive for GMO Click. In fact, the broker reported its second-highest trading FX trading volumes since May of last year.
Over the course of January, the company's clients traded 79.4 trillion yen ($722 billion) in margin FX.
That was a slight decrease over January of last year's 82.7 trillion yen ($750 billion). But it was a large improvement on the second half of 2018 when the broker's clients averaged 62.8 trillion yen ($570 billion) in monthly FX trading.
GMO Click - more than 8,000 new clients
The growth the firm experienced may be due to the fact that it managed to achieve what appears to be its best ever month of client onboarding.
During January of this year, over 8,000 new clients, from 577,691 to 585,995, signed up to trade with GMO Click. As far as this author can tell, that's the largest number of clients the broker has ever onboarded in a single month.
Things were less rosy in the Equities markets. Though the number of equities trading accounts did increase, from 372,589 to 377,701, stocks trading was at its lowest level since December of 2012.
To be fair, equities trading has been comparatively low since the beginning of last year. In January of 2018, the broker reported an average daily trading volume, in equities, of approximately 10 trillion yen ($91 billion). For the same period last year, the value was 4.9 trillion yen ($45 billion).
For the second half of 2018, however, the broker averaged 6.1 trillion yen ($55 billion), meaning that last month was not so much of an outlier looked at from a month-on-month perspective, as opposed to year-on-year perspective.
