FX Platforms See Year-on-Year Growth in December
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: January 9, 2023
While activity was, naturally, muted from November, those FX platforms to report volume data indicate that December 2022 was significantly busier than the same month in 2021 and a number did not even see their quietest month of the year.
FXSpotStream, which reports data across all FX products, reports average daily volume (ADV) in December of $57.6 billion, interestingly not the platform’s quietest month of 2022, that honour goes to January with $53 billion. This represents a 14.4% decline from November, but is up 34.4% year-on-year.
Elsewhere, Cboe FX saw similar shifts, reporting spot FX ADV of $36.8 billion, again more than the platform saw in January 2022, representing a 24.3% year-on-year increase and a 12.2% drop from November. Firm liquidity on Cboe FX was $10.06 billion per day, some 27.3% of overall volume on the firm’s venues, which is the lowest share since March 2021. This represents a 21.6% drop from November, but is up 8.6% from December 2021.
The average median response time on Cboe FX rose to 10 milliseconds in December from 8 in November, while 93% of volume on the firm’s venues was executed anonymously. The non-firm fill rate was slightly higher than November at 87%, largely in line with the average for 2022.
Deutsche Börse’s 360T reports spot FX ADV of $23.3 billion, actually only the third quietest month of 2022 – this is a 6% decline from November, but up 11.5% year-on-year – while Euronext FX reports spot ADV of $18.8 billion, the lowest for 2022, but up 6.2% from December 2021. Month-on-month, activity on Euronext FX was 10.9% lower.
CME Group reports it traded 1,046,000 FX contracts in December, which The Full FX estimates to represents some $104 billion in notional value in both futures and options on futures. This is up 20.8% from November – December being a roll month for CME contracts – but is also up 19.5% from December 2021.
CME’s EBS meanwhile, reports spot ADV of $54.9 billion – the lowest for the platform in 2022 and down 18.3% from November, but up 11.4% year-on-year.
Activity in NDFs followed suit, with activity dropping from November but remaining healthy year-on-year. 360T says ADV in NDFs was $965 million in December, the first time it has dipped below the $1 billion mark since it set the 2022 low of $924 million in April. This represents a 10.5% drop from November, but is up 11.5% year-on-year.
Elsewhere, Cboe FX also saw its second quietest month, after April, with ADV in NDFs dropping 23.5% from November to $694 million. This represents, however, an impressive 89.5% increase from December 2021.
24 Exchange, meanwhile, reports NDF ADV of $627 million, a 34.3% decline from November, but up a whopping 112.5% year-on-year. This is only the sixth quietest month for the venue in 2022.