Records Tumble as FX Platforms Start 2025 Strongly
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: February 3, 2025
FX platforms appear to have started 2025 is a strong fashion, with all of the first group to report volume data hitting a new peak for the month of January.
FXSpotStream came within a whisker of setting a new overall average daily volume record at $101.2 billion – the third time the service has breached the $100 billion mark and just shy of September 2024’s $101.9 billion per day. Within this, spot volumes were the second highest recorded by the platform at $72.85 billion, just shy of August 2024’s record $73.2 billion.
While non-spot volumes at FXSS have also been growing, January actually saw a small decline from December, by 5.1% to $28.3 billion, although they were up 49.9% year-on-year.
Spot volumes grew by 17.1% from December at FXSS, and by 33.1% year-on-year, and to provide further context of the pace of growth at the venue, it’s spot ADV alone, almost matches its total ADV in January 2024.
360T, meanwhile, hit its second highest spot ADV in January, behind only March 2020 and the onset of the global pandemic. Across its platforms 360T handled $34.5 billion per day in spot, a 14.4% increase from December and up 19.8% year-on-year. The strong start comes off a record overall ADV in December for 360T.
Platform performance was steady in January from December, with an average round-trip time (RTT) of 7msm while London and Tokyo each picked up 1% extra share of volume at 31% and 15% respectively, at the expense of the New York matching engine. Currency pair activity was also steady, although Cable saw a tick up to 10% of volume from 8% at the expense of other, non-major currency pairs.
There was also a January record for Cboe FX at $47.5 billion per day, up 15.9% from December and up 8.9% year-on-year. Firm ADV also ticked higher at Cboe, to around $16 billion from around $15 billion (the company does not provide more granular data on this), making just over 33.5% of Cboe FX volume executed in a firm environment.
The percentage of anonymous volume drifted to 92% in January from 93% in December, while the non-firm fill rate was steady at 89%, as was the average response time at 10ms.
Euronext FX completed the good news for the first reporters, with spot ADV of $27.7 billion, up 15.4% on December, and up 11.2% year-on-year. In performance terms, RTTs were steady at 11.6ms to New York and 19.4ms to London, while 26.3% of volume on the anonymous streams was firm. Fill rates drifted again on Euronext, however, with the fill rate on the Skew Safe streams drifting to 79.6% from 80.7% in December, the Full Amount to 93.2% from 93.9% and the Platform to 74.4% from 75.3%.
NDF Volumes Also Start Strongly
There was also good news from the three firms to report NDF volume data, with one hitting a new peak and the two other their second busiest.
Cboe’s SEF reports ADV in NDFs to $2.87 billion in January, the highest yet recorded by the venue. This is 33.9% higher than December – which was the venue’s busiest month to-date – and up an impressive 141.6% year-on-year. After breaking through the $1.5 billion threshold in October, Cboe’s SEF has seen impressive growth, rising 20% to November, 15% to December and now over 33% to January.
360T came within a fraction of setting a new high-water mark for its NDF business at just under $2.2 billion per day. While this is up 7.3% from December and up 58.7% year-on-year, it is just underneath the current high of just over $2.2 billion, set in June 2024.
Finally, 24Exchange had its second busiest month on record, after August 2024, at $3.82 billion per day in NDFs. This is up 26.7% from December and up 29% year-on-year – the record for the platform currently stands just above $4.1 billion per day.