According to the latest Triennial Central Bank Survey released by the Bank for International Settlements on September 5, the daily Forex turnover averaged $5.3 trillion in April 2013. It is just a preliminary report (the final release will be out in December), but it can be treated as an accurate representation of the current state of FX trading industry.
This preliminary version is a mere 24 pages and I definitely recommend reading it. The full version will be released on December 9 and will contain a lot of detailed tables and charts. I would like to highlight the following changes in the world’s foreign exchange market compared to the previous release (2010):
Increase of the total trading volume from $4 to $5.3 trillion.
The share of US dollar trading grew from 84.9% to 87%, of Japanese yen — from 19% to 23%.
At the same time, euro volume fell from 39.1% to 33.4% and that of GBP declined from 12.9% to 11.8%.
Mexican peso entered the top 10 list of the most traded currencies, rising its share from 1.3% to 2.5%. It surpassed both CNY and NZD by the volume.
Four countries — the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Japan — represented 71% of global Forex turnover by geographical location, up from 66% reported for April 2010.
Despite such a low volume of pound trading, the UK remains the major center of FX trade with a share of 40.9% (up from 36.8%).
Although its volume is down from 27.7% to 24.1%, EUR/USD is still the most traded currency pair. It is rather closely followed by USD/JPY, which is up from 14.3% to 18.3% in these three years.
If you have some questions or comments regarding the state of the global foreign exchange market, please feel free to reply below.
