Foreign exchange trading through online retail brokers ticked higher in the third quarter, helped by a rise in politically driven volatility that is looking like the main factor driving the world's biggest financial market this year. Data published by researchers Finance Magnates Business Intelligence (www.financemagnates.com) ahead of an annual industry summit in London showed brokers traded almost $7.5 trillion per month worldwide in the three months to the end of September, up from $7.23 trillion in the previous quarter.
Previously viewed as a sideshow to the trading between banks and big investment and pension funds that forms the core of the $5 trillion-a-day global market in currencies, the retail sector has grown steadily in the last five years. A retreat in wholesale volumes has also made retail accounts a larger part of overall market activity, and trading rose sharply in both quarterly and annual terms at the start of this year.
"It's fair to say that Brexit, or rather the continuous volatility it has created, has contributed to a mild uptick in volumes, in a quarter usually marked by summer slowdown," the website's head of content Jonathan Fine said.
The data, none of which has been checked by Reuters, showed volumes outside the huge Japanese market which makes up almost half of all global retail trading rose to $4.15 trillion a month, or $189 billion a day, from $172 billion a day in the second quarter. Two Asia-focused brokers, GMO Click and DMM.com, continued to lead the website's rankings with volumes more than double those of their nearest competitors. Daily trade in Japan, however, dipped to $150 billion from $163 billion in the second quarter.
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