Euronext, Europe’s largest Exchange , incurred record trading volumes earlier this week at the open on Monday, following the recent convulsions in Chinese equity markets that sent exchanges plunging by the largest interval in over four years.
On August 24, 2015, Euronext yielded a record trading volumes across its combined markets – this includes 550 million managed orders on its cash markets, which surpasses a previous high set back in January 2015 by 22%. Moreover, the exchange had a total of 4,478,154 transactions, which was the largest amount on record in over four years.
Across its derivatives markets, including Euronext’s commodity markets, nearly 217 million orders were managed, another standout performance since the launch of Euronext’s IPO in June 2014. Indeed, 1,515,232 contracts were traded on August 24, the highest mark since December 2014.
Lastly, Euronext’s internal system managed more than 668 million theoretical price updates, which corresponds to over 250% the normal average daily amount throughout the day. A financial market cataclysm started overnight during Asian trading when Chinese equity markets opened down nearly -8.5%. The panic spread to European markets and subsequently to their US counterparts, erasing all 2015 gains thus far on China concerns and headwinds.
While many markets yesterday helped pare losses from Monday, the mood has turned markedly lower, with a strong penchant for risk aversion creeping back into currency and equity markets this week.
According to Lee Hodgkinson, Head of Markets and Global Sales, in a recent statement on the performance, “Yesterday was an exceptional day for trading across all Euronext markets and was our most active day since January 2008. Our trading infrastructure and supervisory teams performed exceptionally well to maintain fair and orderly markets in the face of such intense market activity, underlining the benefits to investors of regulated, transparent and centrally cleared markets.”
Earlier this month, Euronext made headlines after reporting its metrics for the month ending July 2015, which witnessed an average daily transaction value on the Euronext cash order book of just $8,590 million, representing a fall of -12.3% MoM from June 2015. Across a yearly timeframe however, the latest figures corresponded to a growth of 38.0% YoY from July 2014.
