Doesn't time fly by? Just yesterday it was New Year, and now it's already the beginning of February. And with the start of a new month comes an influx of brokers' trading volume reports. This Monday, it was Saxo Bank, the Danish brokerage firm, that released trading volumes for the first month of the year.
By and large, these reports don't make for particularly exciting reading. But on this occasion that's not the case. That's because the firm saw noteworthy declines, across the board, in trading volumes.
Most importantly, the firm saw a fourth consecutive decline in foreign Exchange trading volumes. For January, the Danish broker reported a daily trading average in the FX markets of $6.9 billion.
This was the lowest daily average trading volume that Saxo Bank has reported, for the FX market, since at least the beginning of 2016.
One can see a steady decline over the past six months in the broker's FX trading volumes. In fact, with the exception of August and September, where volumes remained almost the same, average daily FX volumes have shrunk continuously for the broker.
Saxo Bank - not just FX in decline
Similarly, commodities trading reached a volume of $18.7 billion last month. That was its lowest since September and, for the six months prior to this January, Saxo Bank's clients averaged $21.4 billion in commodities trading.
The same was true of equities trading, although here the decline in volumes was slightly more pronounced. Last month, Saxo Bank saw $50.5 billion in equities trading.
That was a steep decline on the $81.2 billion that the Danish broker recorded in January of last year. It was also significantly less than the $64.7 billion monthly average that the firm reported in the second half of 2018.
All of this seems likely to be connected to the introduction of the European Securities and Markets Authority's product intervention measures. Those rules, which were implemented in August, put caps on the amount of Leverage brokers can offer traders. Thus, it's not particularly surprising to see volumes decline for Saxo Bank, just as they have declined for other brokers in the same period.
