CBOE FX Trading Volumes Recover From February Lows in March

Despite a disappointing performance in February, Cboe revealed this Tuesday that it has managed to make a full recovery during March, with trading volumes for its institutional foreign exchange (forex) platform soaring to figures not seen since October of last year.

October of 2018 had the strongest total trading volume out of the whole second half of 2018, coming in at $841,215. Since then, Cboe FX trading volumes have dropped dramatically, with March providing the first sign of a recovery.

Specifically, during the month, a total volume of $809,511 of FX was traded. When measuring this against the previous month, which reported a total volume of only $690,395, March’s figure is higher by 17.3 percent.

In March, the average daily volume (ADV) was $38,548. Again, when comparing this to February of 2019, this is up by 11.7 percent. It is worth noting that there was one less trading day in February than March (21 trading days versus 20). Nonetheless, March’s volumes were also higher than that achieved in January, which had 22 trading days.

CBOE FX Volumes Fall YoY in March

Although March’s figures look solid on a month-on-month comparison, the picture doesn’t look quite so sweet when measuring it against the same month of the previous year. Specifically, on an annual comparison, the trading volume fell by 3.44 percent, down from $838,366 in March of 2018. However, the ADV actually managed to increase by 1.15 percent year-on-year in March of 2019.

Out of the 22 trading days during the month, March 22 had the highest trading volume of $49,668. This is up by 73 percent when compared to the lowest trading volume of $28,690 which was seen just four days earlier on March the 18^th.

Taking a look at the trading volumes during the first quarter of 2019, a total volume of $2,299,044 has been achieved, which translates to an ADV of $36,493. The total volume traded has increased slightly by 0.9 percent when compared with the previous quarter, despite the final quarter of 2018 having two extra trading days.