CME Group announced today (Tuesday) that the daily volume of foreign exchange futures on its derivatives platform reached an all-time high of 3.26 million contracts, with a notional value of $314 billion, on June 12.

New Records on CME

Further, on the same day, CME’s anonymous and all-to-all spot-futures spread trading tool, FX Link, also achieved a single-day volume record of 113,662 contracts, with a notional value of $10.5 billion.

“Achieving two all-time volume records on June 12 is a significant milestone for CME Group FX products and is testament to the continued growth that we have seen in client segments, currency pairs, and overall liquidity over many months,” said Paul Houston, CME Group’s Global Head of FX Products.

The latest FX futures figure has surpassed the previous record of 3.15 million contracts, with a notional value of $296 billion, achieved on March 8, 2023.

For FX Link, the latest record represents a 37 percent increase over the previous peak of 82,900 contracts, with a notional volume of $7.2 billion, on June 16, 2022. The volume of FX Link jumped by over 52 percent year-over-year.

FX Link - A Crucial Solution

FX Link offers a central limit order book on CME Globex for trading spreads between OTC FX spot and CME FX futures, thus connecting the two markets.

“FX Link will play a crucial role in our new CME FX Spot+ marketplace as we prepare for client testing in the second half of 2024,” Houston added. “The improved liquidity, tighter spreads, and increasing client participation build an even stronger foundation for delivering value to market participants in the future.”

Commenting on the record numbers, Deutsche Bank’s Global Head of Forward eTrading, Shuo Wu, said: “We are pleased to see the continued growth in CME Group FX futures and FX Link as complementary sources of liquidity to the OTC market and as mechanisms to help automate the trading of products like FX swaps.”

Meanwhile, CME is reportedly planning to offer spot Bitcoin trading to its clients. It is already operating a cryptocurrency futures exchange, which offers standard and micro futures contracts for Bitcoin and Ether.