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The summer slowdown in FX platforms volumes has certainly kicked in, with all platforms showing falls in Jul15.

Among the Top Tier platforms, falls ranging from Reuters Spot with $101bn in July the fourth consecutive monthly fall in volumes (lowest since Jul 14), down -6.5% from the $108bn in June, EBS at $82.1bn in July (lowest since Jun 14), down a far larger -18.6% from the $101bn in June and CME Futures (now included in my analysis) with $91.6bn in July (lowest since Aug 14), down a massive -26% from the $123bn in June.

However, all the Top Tier platforms still show year on year gains, ranging from Reuters +2.3% to EBS up +16.3% and CME up a huge +25.7% compared to Jul 14.

Whilst among the second tier platforms, Hotspot at $23.5bn in July (lowest since Dec 12) down -8.6% from the $26bn in June, and Gain GTX (the ECN) at $17bn in July are down -10.5% on June, and GAIN Institutional down -12.1% at $18.2bn in June, and with Fastmatch and FXCM down around -13% (lowest since Feb 15, the month after the SNB shock) compared with June.

Top Tier Platforms

Looking more closely, it’s interesting that both EBS and CME both saw such large falls in volumes compared to relatively minor falls at Reuters, although not sure what you can put this down to, and as we don’t see a breakdown in EBS markets vs EBSDirect volumes it’s not possible to say which side of the business saw the biggest fall.

Table showing Top Tier platforms: Reuters, EBS and CME vols for Jul 2015

In terms of the Reuters-EBS differential that we track, July has seen a sharp reversal of the spread in favor of Reuters, with the red line in the chart below has now broken back above the dotted blue downtrend line establish back in Jan 14 as can be seen below by the direction of the rising red arrows.

Chart showing the gap between Reuters and EBS spot FX (Reuters-EBS) vols for Jul 2015

Second Tier Platforms

In terms of the second tier, all the platforms falls show monthly falls, ranging from Hotspot down -8.6% to FXCM down -13.6%. However, in terms of year on year changes, the picture is much different, with GAIN GTX (the ECN), and GAIN Institutional platform each showing decent gains on a year ago of +7.6% and +5.8% respectively.

Whilst the others all show falls year on year, ranging from Fastmatch down -7.3% to Hotspot almost down -21% and FXCM down nearly -22% compared to July 14.

Table showing Second Tier platforms: Hotspot, Fastmatch GAIN and FXCM vols for Jul 2015

Looking at the charts for the second tier platforms, they mirror each other, as volumes continue to slide into summer.

Looking at the gap chart between Hotspot and Fastmatch, it appears to be in a slight downtrend channel, moving towards the lower boundary of the channel as shown by the lower of the two dotted blue lines.

Chart showing the gap between Hotspot and Fastmatch spot FX (Hotspot-Fastmatch) vols for Jul 2015

Filed under: FX, Paul Blank, Survey Results |