Cboe announces volumes for August, presents mixed picture

The July trading volumes had shown some strong trading volumes as the investors and traders strongly returned to the markets after the pandemic. Index options were most in demand in July and the same story has been repeated in August well as the index options volume showed a 28.4% increase when compared to the same month last year. But as we have always been mentioning when covering trade volumes for this year, any comparisons to last year has to be taken with a pinch of salt as the whole world was under a pandemic for most of last year and there was fear in the markets with many retail traders choosing to pay off the markets at that time.

It is expected that the traders would be returning to the markets around this time of the year and hence the pick up in trading volumes is something that is to be expected. The largest drop in volume was in the Canadian equities which showed a 10.2% drop in volume when compared to the same month last year but overall, the year-to-date volumes continue to exceed last year by a healthy 31.6% which shows that the demand for Canadian equities this year has been pretty strong so far.

The other highlights include a 30.6% market share for Cboe’s block trading platform in Europe called Cboe LIS. The Global FX trading volumes have not shown much change when compared to the same month last year with a rise of only 2.2% and the year-to-date volumes also remain lesser by 4.5% as compared to last year. This shows that the interest in trading FX continues to remain dull as the volatility in the FX markets has remained low and traders, especially the retail traders are looking to trade more volatile instruments like cryptos and this seems to be affecting the FX trading volumes ever since the start of this year. We believe that this trend will continue for the rest of the year as the crypto prices are expected to remain buoyant in the coming months which will keep the traders hooked.