Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
GMO Click Securities, part of Japanese brokerage GMO Click Holdings, was the forex broker with the world’s largest retail trading volume of JPY 144.3 trillion, or about $1.28 trillion, in February 2016, according to the latest reports of the key market players. It was followed by US-based Forex Capital Markets, or FXCM, which generated a trading volume of $309 billion in February.
The statistics does not include the metrics of UK forex brokers, including IG Group, Plus500, CMC Markets, Oanda, and others, since they do not publish such data.
FX Prime, also part of GMO Click group, was the broker with the highest monthly growth of 32% in trading volume from retail trading activities. As it seems, only Japanese forex brokers saw their February volumes growing over the month, while the rest of the brokers posted declines of 0.4%-13.3%.
In the US, FXCM continued to be the leading forex broker, closely followed by Gain Capital, the owner of Forex.com, which posted a double loss rate compared to FXCM. The broker’s volume fell to $276.3 billion in February.
Compared to a year earlier, all forex brokers saw an increase in trading volumes, excluding GMO Click Securities and FX Prime for which no data was available. The largest annual growth of 45% was posted by Saxo Bank, a Danish bank specialized in providing online trading services, including forex.
Forex accounts | Retail forex trading volume | ||||
February 2016 | February 2016 | January 2016 | m/m change | y/y change | |
433,076 | $1.28 trillion | JPY 123.4 trillion | + 17% | N/A | |
175,522 | $309 billion | $331 billion | +7% | +36% | |
143,673 | $276.3 billion | $318.7 billion | -13.3% | +13.1% | |
| Saxo Bank | N/A | $259 billion | $258 billion | -0.4% | +45% |
| 30,435 | $192.4 million | $197.3 million | -2.5% | +14% | |
| FX Prime | 167,699 | $148.8 billion | JPY 12.7 trillion | +32%
| N/A |
63,477 | $42.9 billion | $37.9 billion | +13% | +33.6% | |
274,164 | 96.3 billion | 92.4 billion | +4.2% | +9.6% | |
GMO Click Securities also had the largest number of trading accounts in February – 433,076, while Monex Group, another Japanese forex holding company, handled the lowest number – 63,477.
Meanwhile, some other brokers that offer forex, but specialize in stocks and futures, posted daily average revenue trades (DARTs), or the daily number of transactions that generate revenue, for February, instead of monthly trading volumes. The highest DARTs figure 767,000 was reported by US-based Interactive Brokers. The February DARTs of all forex brokers went down if compared to the previous month. However, E-Trade is the only one to post an annual decline.
DARTS | m/m change | y/y change | |
767,000 | – 8% | +21% | |
Monex Group | 354,366 | -1.5% | +5.0% |
164,007 | -6.4% | -8.6% | |
TradeStation Group | 138,033 | – 4.8% | +4.4% |
(USD=112.81 Japanese yen)
Please note that this article has been edited to correct the ranking.
