Brokers in Europe may be feeling the pinch from the European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) latest regulation but for offshore brokers, things aren’t looking bad.

On Wednesday, Alpari – a retail broker with licences in Belize and St Vincent and the Grenadines – released its trading volumes for August. In the first month after ESMA’s rules came into effect, the broker reported a year-on-year increase in trading volumes.

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In August of 2017, the halcyon days of high European leverage, Alpari reported a total trading volume of $120.8 billion. This year that number grew to $137.4 billion – a 13.7 percent year-on-year increase.

From a month-on-month perspective, things were less impressive. In July of this year, Alpari reported a total trading volume of $144.5 billion. That meant August saw a month-on-month decline in trading of approximately 5.2 percent.

Alpari wins gold

To give Alpari its due, those statistics are rather misleading. The reason being that July was the broker’s best month of the year thus far. When we consider any confusion that may have stemmed from ESMA’s regulation, August wasn’t too shabby a month for the firm.

In fact, the broker noted that volumes increased in all of its major instruments. The only exception to this was GBP/USD trading. Alpari’s statement indicates that this grew dramatically in June and July but returned to pre-summer levels in August.

The broker also said that its clients have expressed a growing interest in gold trading. According to the firm, this interest is a result of political and economic unrest across the globe.

The result of this was a huge surge in gold trading by Alpari’s client-base. The broker noted that turnover in the XAU/USD instrument grew by 45 percent in July. In August it grew by another 16 percent, reaching its highest level in the company’s history.