FX Volumes Rise in February

The first group of FX platforms to publish average daily volume (ADV) data for February indicate a rise in activity from January, with FXSpotStream reporting its second busiest month ever.

At $49.6 billion per day, FXSpotStream crept above its previous second highest month in January, activity being second only to the mayhem-induced record in March 2020. Indeed, of the first group of platforms to report, FXSS was the only to record a year-on-year rise, of 3.8%. February reinforced a strong start to the year, it recorded ADV of $49 billion in January and also announced it would be rolling out functionality to support the use of algos and allocations in Q2.

CboeFX reports ADV of $37.6 billion, which means February equals November 2020 as the platform’s busiest month since last March. This represents a 7.4% increase from January and is down 8.8% year-on-year. ADV on CboeFX’ firm liquidity was $10.71 billion, 28.5% of volume and, according to Cboe, 39% of its ECN flow. At 28.5% of overall volume, the share of firm liquidity is up on February 2020, where it was 26.67%, however for 10 months of 2020 the share of firm liquidity was above 31%. The fill ratio on non-firm liquidity in February was 88.26%, the highest it has been since CboeFX starting publishing this data.

Elsewhere, Deutsche Borse’s 360T handled $25.3 billion of spot FX volume in February, a 2% month-on-month increase but down 6.6% year-on-on-year; while Euronext FX reports SDV of $21.9 billion, a 2.8% increase from January and 5.6% down year-on-year. Both platforms, however, recorded their highest ADV since March 2020, and in the case of 360T, this is the platform’s third busiest month since it started publishing data.