The final month of 2019 has yet again proven to be fruitful for another trading provider - with GMO Click, the retail brokerage unit of the Japanese IT giant GMO Internet, publishing an uptick in trading on monthly comparison.
December is usually a quiet month for traders, given the holiday season. However, November saw trading providers across the globe report a significant drop in volumes, with many recording their worst performance all year.
The foreign exchange (Forex ) over the counter (OTC) volumes were provided to Finance Magnates from GMO Click itself. In December, the retail broker reported a total volume of $486.8 billion for OTC FX trading.
When measuring this against November’s weak trading volume of $465.2 billion, December has achieved a 4.6 percent month-on-month gain. However, although trading might be up on a monthly comparison, that doesn’t mean that that the broker reported solid volumes for the month.
As mentioned above, posting a recovery from November wasn’t particularly hard for brokers, as November was an unusually quiet month. Because of this, it’s good to compare the figures on a yearly comparison, to get a complete picture.
Sure enough, when looking at last month’s volume and measuring it against the same period of the previous year, December of 2018, the picture doesn’t look quite so rosy. In fact, the trading volume has fallen by 12.3 percent, from the $554.9 billion OTC forex volume posted in December of 2018, in December of last year.
2019: a difficult year for brokers
In fact, 2019 as a whole has been a difficult year for many brokers in terms of FX volumes. This is because low volatility constantly plagued the trading markets throughout the year. For GMO Click, the broker consistently reported a drop in OTC Forex Trading volumes from June of 2019, all the way to November.
Taking a look at on-exchange trading, GMO Click reported a monthly trading volume of $2.5 billion. This also represents an increase of 31.6 percent from the $1.9 billion volume achieved by the broker in November.
