Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
After a very strong Septmeber in terms of trading activity, forex brokers saw their trading volume fall on the month in October by up to 46.7%. Regardless, all brokers kept their ranking by largest volume from the preceding month.
GMO Click Securities, part of Japanese forex group GMO Click, continues to lead with a trading volume of JPY 80.6 trillion, or about $730 billion, last month, posting a drop on a monthly and annual basis of 10.9% and 6.5%, respectively.
The statistics is based on the latest reports of the key market players and does not include the metrics of UK and other forex brokers, including IG Group, Plus500, and CMC Markets, among others, since they do not publish such data.
In October, the largest monthly drop in revenue of 46.7% was registered by FX Prime, another member of the GMO Click group. Meanwhile,
Multi-regulated Exness reported the lowest decline of 4.2% on a monthly basis. The broker generated a trading volume of $208.9 billion last month. Even though its volume went down, Exness still performed well and even posted a new record-high number of active clients (39,911) in October. In fact, Exness was the only broker which reported an annual increase in October trading volume, even though a small one (3.9%).
Meanwhile, US brokers Forex Capital Markets (FXCM) and Gain Capital also performed rather well since their volumes declined by a monthly 6% and 8.2%, respectively.
Following is more details about the monthly trading metrics of retail forex brokers for September 2016:
Retail forex trading volume | Retail forex accounts | |||||||
October 2016 | September 2016 | m/m change | y/y change | October 2016 | September 2016 | m/m change | y/y change | |
$730 bn | $819 bn | –10.9% | -6.5% | 459,402 | 456,103 | +0.7% | +9.2% | |
$305 bn | $324 bn | –6% | -9% | 177,949 | 177,818 | +0.1% | –0.2% | |
$266 bn | $266 bn | 0% | +22% | – | – | – | – | |
$208.9 bn | $218 bn | –4.2% | +3.9% | 39,911 | 39,643 | +0.7% | +11.6% | |
$190.9 bn | $207.8 bn | -8.2% | –34.8% | 131,277 | 133,009 | –1.3% | –11.5% | |
FX Prime | $46.2 bn | $86 bn | -46.7% | -12.4% | 169,013 | 168,494 | +0.3% | +2.6% |
Meanwhile, some other brokers that offer forex, but specialize in stocks and futures as well, posted daily average revenue trades (DARTs), or the daily number of transactions that generate revenue, for last month, instead of trading volumes. All but E-Trade also reported a decline in last month’s DARTs, although more moderate than their peers. For more information, please see the table below:
Broker | DARTs | m/m change | y/y change | Total active accounts |
603,000 | -7% | –8% | 374,900 | |
236,895 | -5.7% | -14.7% | – | |
Monex Inc. | 142,983 | -3.3% | –9.7% | 1,011,472 |
TradeStation Group | 94,307 | -9.1% | -20.9% | 65,015 |
168,739 | +2.1% | +16.7% | 5,224,900 |
($=110.36 Japanese yen)
