Despite many firms across the institutional and retail FX businesses having struggled to pull their revenues out of the doldrums, North American multi-asset electronic trading firm KCG is continuing to show strength, with July’s market making volumes having averaged $24.4 billion dollar volume traded, 5.7 billion shares traded, and 3.3 million trades per day in U.S. equities, which is an increase compared with the $23.5 billion dollar average daily volumes in June this year.
Although the overall average figure demonstrates an increase, share trading was down from 8.2 billion in May, and US equity trading reduced by a very small margin from 3.4 million trades per day in May. These results show an opposing dynamic to those of June, in which FX increased and other asset classes performed less well on a monthly basis.
Since reporting volumes generated by KCG’s Hotspot FX ECN separately, the firm has performed relatively well, however FX is one asset class that dropped in revenues in July, with Hotspot FX having generated $24.0 billion per day in notional FX volume compared with $24.1 billion in May. This minor reduction is negligible, however, and is likely to be no cause for concern for KCG, a company which returned to form remarkably quickly following the infamous algorithmic trading catastrophe two years ago.
Since then, the company has reformed itself, and settled the loans associated with the GETCO acquisition well in advance, and is now demonstrating fine performance all round.
As for the overall market conditions in July, consolidated U.S. equity volume averaged $240.0 billion in dollar volume and 5.8 billion shares traded per day. The realized volatility for the S&P 500 was 10.8.
For the full release, click here.