OCC cleared contract volume up 15% in March

Equity derivatives clearing organization OCC has announced that total cleared contract volume in March reached 442,945,572 contracts, a 15% increase from March 2017. Highlights include:

• Highest first quarter volume and highest first quarter for equity options on record
• Cleared futures average daily volume for quarter up six percent from Q1 2017
• Index options volume up 10 percent in March and 45 percent year-to-date
• Securities lending activity up 13 percent in March and 26 percent year-to-date

OCC’s year-to-date volume is up 32% with 1,400,345,396 cleared contracts in the first quarter of 2018, compared to 1,058,670,212 contracts in the first quarter of 2017.

Options: Overall exchange-listed options volume reached 434,032,307 contracts in March, up 16 percent from March 2017. Equity options volume reached a total of 384,613,937 contracts, a 17 percent increase from March 2017. This includes cleared ETF options volume of 181,592,017 contracts last month, a 15 percent increase over March 2017 volume of 157,358,886 contracts. This includes cleared Index options volume was up 10 percent with 49,418,370 contracts in March.

Futures: Futures cleared by OCC reached 8,913,265 contracts in March, down 28 percent from March 2017. OCC’s average daily cleared futures volume in the first quarter was 549,817 contracts, six percent higher than the first quarter of 2017.

Securities Lending: OCC’s securities lending CCP activity was up 13 percent in new loans from March 2017 with 236,202 transactions last month. Year-to-date stock loan activity increased 26 percent from 2017 with 694,058 new loan transactions in the first quarter of 2018. The average daily loan value at OCC in March was $182,740,398,438.