Monex Group Joins Japanese Trend of Declining Trading Volumes

Japanese brokerage Monex Group has announced its monthly business metrics for the month of July 2017. Up until last month, the company had managed to buck the trend of its Japanese peers and reported positive numbers. However, in July, Monex also seems to have been affected by the same trend.

In July 2017, the group reported 263,329 Daily Average Revenue Trades (DARTs) per business day. This is the average number of trades per day that generated revenue. This represents a fall of 3.06% over the number of DARTs from June 2017 and a fall of 4.27% from the same month last year.

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Though the average number of revenue trades fell, the group reported an increase in the number of total accounts to 1,714,173, which is an increase of 0.2% MoM. The number of active accounts also rose slightly to 1,032,023, a monthly increase of 0.17%.

In terms of FX, Monex reported average daily volumes of 98.11 billion yen ($0.89 billion), 6.7% less than in the previous month. The number of active OTC FX accounts rose slightly by 85 to 65,179 accounts.

The number of DARTs per business day also dropped to 170,120, which was 1.7% less than that of the previous month. We have noticed this fall in FX numbers across almost all Japanese brokers during this period which may be due to the holiday period in Japan.

In keeping with the trend of falling numbers across the group, the number of DARTs in the Tradestation group dropped by 5.3 percent to 93,932 when compared to the previous month and this was lower by 3.47 percent when compared to the same period last year.

Declining trading volumes is a general trend across the FX market in Japan during this summer. A drop in trading activity when compared to last year is consistent with the patterns we see across the globe. The Brexit event triggered somewhat increased activity in GBP trading last year, a trend which is non-existent this year.