Both Japanese FX and Binary Options Volumes Down in February, FFAJ Reports

The Financial Futures Association of Japan (FFAJ) released today both its over-the-counter (OTC) retail FX margin trading and binary options figures for February 2017. The data shows that the two popular forms of OTC trading went thorough a cooldown during the month compared with a very strong performance in January.

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In terms of its OTC retail FX volumes, the FFAJ yielded $3.305 trillion (¥380.5 trillion) in February, down from $5.0 trillion (¥561.5 trillion) in January 2017 - a drop of just over 32% month-over-month. On a yearly comparison the Japanese FX volumes of February seem even worse - down 36% from $5.2 trillion (¥594.5 trillion) in February 2016.

Looking at the binary options figures, the Japanese industry saw its total monthly binary options trading volume come in at just $306.5 million (¥35.3 billion) in February - down 15.7% from $369.8 million (¥41.9 billion) in January 2017. Compared yearly, the figure looks even worse - down 31.6% from $448.2 million (¥51.6 billion) in February 2016.

With regard to the breakdown of trading volumes by currency pair, we see that the USD/JPY pair continued to dominate both FX and binary options trading in Japan during February 2017. It accounted for about 53% of all the trading volume on all currency pairs in total and also about 83% of all trading done in retail FX in total during February 2017.