End of month volatility saves August institutional FX volumes
What appeared to be a typically quiet end-of-summer trading season in institutional FX during August 2020 heated up over the last few trading sessions, lifting with it trading volumes for the month.
FNG’s examination of daily trading volumes at some of the world’s leading institutional FX venues indicates that some normalcy had returned to the markets, with August trading volumes down slightly from July – as often occurs each year. However that trend quickly reversed late last week, when some dollar dumping occurred and both the EUR and GBP started to rise against the USD. GBPUSD had been in a fairly tight range around 1.31 most of the month, but popped up to 1.34 as September loomed.
What the meant for institutional FX ECNs and brokers was that volumes picked up significantly in late August, turning a down month (volume-wise) into an up month for most of the key institutional FX players.
Overall, average volumes were up an average of 3% at leading institutional FX platforms, with only Cboe FX showing a decline, as follows:
Cboe FX (formerly HotspotFX)
- August 2020 total volumes $602.7 billion, or ADV $28.7 billion, -4.4% MoM
EuronextFX (formerly FastMatch)
- August 2020 ADV $18.9 billion, +6.8% MoM over July’s $17.7 billion.
FXSpotStream
- ADV of USD41.163 billion versus USD40.414 billion in July, an increase of 1.85% MoM.
- August registers as the third consecutive month with an ADV over USD40 billion, the first time this has been achieved by FXSpotStream ever.
- FXSpotStream’s 2020 ADV (Jan-Aug) of USD 42.750billion, is up 14.31% when compared to the same period during 2019 of USD37.398 billion.
- ADV YoY (Aug ’19 vs Aug ’20) decreased 4.82%.
Integral
- Average daily volumes (ADV) across Integral platforms totaled $39.8 billion in August 2020. This represents an increase of 6.4% compared to July 2020, and an increase of 15.4% compared to the same period in 2019.