One of the biggest publicly listed brokers GAIN Capital has published its monthly volume metrics for the month of March in a press release. The retail side of business has marked a rise to $184.6 billion, which is higher by 9% over the month of February and by 31.1% over last year's figures. That said, the year-on-year increase is primarily due to the GFT Acquisition that the company has concluded last year.
Retail Trading Volumes
The average daily volume (ADV) on retail trading accounts was $8.8 billion, which is higher by 3.9% from February, while the number of active trading accounts has remained unchanged over last month around 96,614, which is also higher by 57.5% over last year's figures.
It's worth pointing out that the year-on-year difference between account numbers and monthly volumes is quite stark - while the number of accounts has increased markedly, volumes have done so at a bit more than half the rate of active accounts number increase. This means that the average trading activity per account has decreased substantially over last year.
The futures Daily Average Revenue Trades (DARTs) have totalled to 23,884, which is a whopping increase by 40% over February's numbers and 78.2% higher that a year ago. Apparently there is a substantial amount of trading activity that is moving from FX to Futures trading.
The total number of funded accounts has come out at 138,307 - higher by 4% over last month.
Institutional Trading Volumes
On the institutional side of GAIN Capital's business volumes, the numbers have totalled to $441.7 billion, which is higher by 7% over February and by 63.9% over last year's figures. The average daily volume has increased more modestly by 1.9% over last month to $21 billion, which is still higher by 63.9% over the same period in 2013.
The company's GTX unit that provides FX ECN services to institutional investors including hedge funds has marked the month with an increase of 9% to $404.2 billion. This figure is precisely 50% higher than in March 2013. The average daily volume has come out at $19.2 billion, or 3.8% higher than in February.
