Refinitiv reports first rise in FX volumes since September

Foreign exchange trading volumes across Refinitiv Matching and FXall platforms were up 13 percent from $403 billion in December 2022. The figure was down -7 percent from $491 billion in January 2022, and also reflects an 18 percent drop from March’s yearly high.

December’s ADV figure was the lowest in nearly three years, namely since currency volumes bottomed out at $366 billion in May 2020.

This was the first monthly rise in turnover after three consecutive declines since the volumes peaked at $472 billion in September 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 $100 billion was FX spot, representing a 16 percent rise over the monthly interval when compared to $86 billion in December 2022. On a yearly basis, the spot turnover outpaced its counterpart of January 2022, which came at $97 billion.

A stronger activity in other transaction types, including forwards, swaps, options and non-deliverable forwards (NDFs), contributed to the monthly rise, having clocked in their best month since September. The figure averaged $355 billion daily, which is up 12 percent from $317 billion in the previous month.

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.