Russia’s key financial bourse, Moscow Exchange , listed under ticker symbol MOEX, today released March trading volumes which showed improvements in key segments when compared to February’s results, as well as year-over-year (YoY) gains of 43.4% when compared to March 2015, coupled with some mixed results both month-over-month (MoM), and YoY, as seen below.
FX market turnover rose 40.3% to RUB 30.8 trillion year-over-year from 22 trillion, yet was little-changed MoM from RUB 30.5 trillion in February, up barely eight-tenths of a percent.
Spot trades fell to RUB 10.8 trillion from RUB 12.4 trillion in February, yet swap trades increased to RUB 20.0 trillion from 18.1 trillion in the prior month. This caused the FX market's average daily turnover to decrease by 50.8 billion or 3.5% to RUB 1,400.0 billion (USD 19.9 billion) in March, from 1,450.8 billion (USD 18.8 billion) in February, yet was still up YoY compared to the RUB 1,045.7 billion reported in March 2015.
Mixed Results
Despite being up 79.9% YoY from RUB 6.3 trillion, the derivatives market volumes at MOEX fell from RUB 13.4 trillion in February to RUB 11.4 trillion in March, a drop of 17.5% month-over-month. This included 182.1 million contracts traded, compared to 207.9 million contracts during the previous month.
From March’s total, futures contracts represented 175.5 million contracts, down from 202 million contracts traded in the prior month, whereas options accounted for 6.5 million contracts from the March total, higher from the 5.9 million options contracts traded in February.
The amount of open interest also declined significantly as Volatility subsided in financial markets, with MOEX RUB open interest falling from 828.9 billion to RUB 586.8 billion in March, yet was still higher from RUB 336.5 billion in the previous year.
Trading volumes on MOEX’s precious metals market decreased to RUB 10.1 billion from RUB 11.3 billion in February, for gold contracts, and trading volumes on silver fell to RUB 7.2 million from 12.6 million in the prior month. Overall, March saw large declines in key segments, compared to February, despite inching higher in FX volumes.
Source: Finance Magnates using MOEX data
