Back to Back Record Months at GMO Click Securities

Records are meant to be broken. Following last month’s all time record volume figures for a FX retail broker from Japanese GMO Click Securities, the firms has topped those figures. Over February, total volume at the broker rose 10.8% to $861.7 billion. The figure includes both volume for OTC and Exchange trader Click 365 trading. At $844 billion, OTC trading composed bulk of GMO’s trading volume. The figures were even more impressive when taking into account the shortened February month.

The figures, coupled with an earlier announcement from the Tokyo Financial Exchange clearly indicate that interest in forex trading has returned to the forefront in Japan. The gains in forex trading occurred even as the Japanese equity market has been rallying, with the Nikkei 225 index climbing 23% in the past three months. As such, even though 2011 regulation curbed margin use, the spike in volume in the face of a bullish equity market reveals that Japanese traders continue to favor forex over stock trading. (We wrote more about the effects of the Japanese stock market in building the FX asset class in a post last month about DMM Securities)

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With yen volatility remaining high, the question now is what happens to volume figures if we do see a drop in trading action. Looking ahead, we should shortly see how DMM Securities as well as the US Exchanges and global ECN venues fared during February later this week.