Mixed Non-Spot Fortunes as 2022 Closes Out
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: February 1, 2023
The December 2022 FX volume reporting “season” has been rounded out with CLS, Refinitiv and 360T reporting data, highlighting different fortunes for the two platforms’ non-spot businesses.
CLS says that total average daily volume (ADV) settled by the service in December was $1.704 trillion, a 9.9% drop from November, but up 3.3% year-on-year. Spot ADV was $409 billion, down 13.5% from November (only EBS dropped by more in percentage terms), but up 9.3% year-on-year (which largely under-performs all platforms). Outright forward activity on CLS was $107 billion per day, down 26.2% from November and up 12.6$ year-on-year.
There were interesting contrasts in the non-spot data released by Refinitiv and 360T, the former saw a decline on both month-on-month and year-on-year basis, while the latter saw an increase. Refinitiv, which also reported spot ADV across its platforms of $86 billion (-10.4% from November and up 1.2% from December 2021), had non-spot volumes of $317 per day. This represents a 4.5% drop from November, and also an 8.9% drop from December 2021.
By contrast, 360T reports total ADV of EUR 127.6 billion, and adjusting for the earlier reported spot turnover and calculating at a fixed annual exchange rate, this comes in at $107.3 billion. Not only is this a 7.5% increase on November, it is also up 19.9% year-on-year.
Interestingly, December is historically a very good month for 360T. December 2022 represents the second highest ADV for the year and since 2015 when the platform started publishing data, December has been either the highest (four times) or second highest (also four times) every year.
As a broader marker, CLS FX swap volumes were down 6.8% from November at $1.188 trillion, this is a fraction (0.7%) higher year-on-year.
The final regular reporter, Integral, is yet to publish December data.