The Financial Futures Association of Japan has today produced its quarterly report on FX trading activity among all Japanese FX companies and trading venues, revealing that between January 1 and March 31 this year, margin FX trading volume which was conducted on an OTC basis dropped by 7.8%, whilst exchange traded FX took a 23.5% tumble compared with the previous quarter of October 1 to December 31, 2014.
Margin FX trading on Japanese exchanges decreased substantially, with just 9,616,873 contracts traded in the first quarter of this year compared to 12,573,762 in the previous quarter.
This 23.5% decrement in activity was mirrored by a decline in Japanese trading on overseas exchanges, which declined from 9,059,887 in the final quarter of last year, to 8,112,953 in the first quarter of 2015, representing a 10.4% drop.
Whilst not as dramatically affected, OTC FX trading took a hit in the first quarter of this year, decreasing to 16.2 trillion yen from 17.6 trillion yen in the previous quarter.
When viewed on an annual basis, the trading volumes for the full year are more promising, with a 13.2% increase in overall OTC FX volume in the year ending March 31, 2015, at 42.7 trillion yen compared to 42.1 trillion yen in the year ending March 31, 2014, which is remarkable when bearing in mind the summer months of 2013 which heralded a period of sustained high volumes for large Japanese brokerages including GMO Click Securities and DMM Securities which achieved monthly trading volumes of over $1 trillion each for several consecutive months.
When bearing this in mind, it is clear that the final quarter of the year, despite its low volumes, did not scupper the overall performance among FX market participants in Japan for the financial year 2014.
For the official report from the FFAJ, click here.