Refinitiv reports lowest volumes for FX swaps, options since Dec 2019
Refinitiv, the former Financial and Risk business of Thomson Reuters, today reported that the average daily volumes (ADV) of currency trading were $403 billion last month on the company’s main FX trading services.
December’s ADV figure is the lowest in in nearly three years, namely since currency volumes bottomed out at $366 billion in May 2020.
Foreign exchange trading volumes across Refinitiv Matching and FXall platforms were down -6 percent from $428 billion in November 2022. The figure was also down -7 percent from $433 billion in December 2021, and also reflects an 18 percent drop from March’s yearly high.
This was the third monthly fall in turnover in a row since the volumes peaked at $369 billion in June when the war-led volatility that sparked record trading in March lost steam.
Spot FX volumes at Refinitiv, still partly owned by Thomson Reuters, held up much better than other volumes, which include swaps and options. The institutional venue reported $86 billion was FX spot, representing a 10 percent drop over the monthly interval when compared to $96 billion in November 2022. On a yearly basis, the spot turnover outpaced its counterpart of December 2021, which came at $85 billion.
Weaker activity in other transaction types, including forwards, swaps, options and non-deliverable forwards (NDFs), contributed to the monthly drop, having clocked in their worst month since December 2019. The figure averaged $317 billion daily, which is down 5 percent from $344 billion in the previous month.
Refinitiv’s figures reflect the trend observed in the monthly figures from many of the major trading platforms which have seen record-breaking volumes in the third quarter before turning to suffer lackluster activity.
Refinitiv has recently struck up a strategic agreement with FXCubic, a trading technology provider for institutional and retail brokers, to integrate its Elektron as a service into their ecosystem.
Depending on their business model and market conditions, Refinitiv Elektron offers partners an ultra-low latency order routing and pricing engine, also giving the institutions the opportunity to connect to a wide range of liquidity providers. This includes cross-asset market and pricing data, providing 9 million prices updates per second over 84 million instruments and 2.5 terabytes of real-time pricing daily.
