Foreign Exchange trading volumes rose to a record high in February across FXSpotStream LLC platforms, data showed on Monday, as a rise in Volatility encouraged more buying and selling of currencies.
During February 2020, FXSpotStream reported an average daily volume (ADV) of $47.8 billion, which represented a jump of 29 percent month-on-month from $37.0 billion reported back in January 2020. Across a yearly interval, the ADV metric in February 2020 reflected an advance of 37 percent from year-ago levels when weighed against $34.8 billion in February 2019.
The figure is a new all-time high, besting the previous record set back in August 2019 at $43.2 billion.
The numbers released by FXSpotStream, the aggregator service of LiquidityMatch and a major institutional platform in the FX market, follows a huge surge in trading at Cboe FX, with its February volumes up to $825 billion to mark its best-ever month in two years.
CLS, and Thomson Reuters to follow suite
Elsewhere, currency trading on Integral’s trading platforms rose more than 19 percent in February 2020 from a year earlier, as increased volatility across financial markets led to greater activity on the institutional FX venue, the company said.
Average daily volumes topped $39.9 billion last month, which is up 12.4 percent compared with the figures from the month before and was also up nearly twenty percent relative to August 2019.
Integral has recently stepped up its expansion in the FX prime brokerage (PB) space. The company has teamed up with Jefferies FXPB to launch TrueFX, a product the two firms believe will allow buyside firms to access the FX market at “a fraction of today’s trading costs.”
The rise in FX volumes will be welcomed by both retail and professional platforms, including major exchanges, that have struggled with calm financial markets squeezing their profits in recent months.
Other institutional FX platforms, including CLS and Thomson Reuters, are also expected to report a significant rise in volumes of last month as volatility picked up, and the secular trend of rising FX volumes comes into play again.
