Today, the Basel-basedBank for International Settlements released its 2016 Triennial Central Bank Survey of FX and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets. It is based on the survey conducted in April this year. The main report is rather short (23 pages) and contains some interesting data. The most important stuff is listed here:
Overall trading volume is down from $5.4 to $5.1 trillion per day.
The size of spot market decreased from $2 trillion (38% share) to $1.7 trillion (33%) in 2016.
The share of non-financial customers (that’s where retail FX belongs) is down from 8.8% to 7.5% in the overall market’s turnover.
The share of the US dollar increased slightly — from 87% in 2013 to 87.6% in 2016.
The Australian dollar saw a massive drop of its turnover in 2016 â from 8.6% to 6.9%.
The fastest growing currency by turnover was the Chinese yuan — up from 2.2% to 4.0%.
The total volume of all emerging markets currencies rose from 18.8% to 21.2%.
Five countries â the UK, the USA, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan â represented 77% of the global FX turnover by geographical location, up from 75.1% reported for April 2013.
The role of London (UK) as a trading center has declined — from 40.8% to 37.1%. However, it still dominates the foreign exchange market — the USA follows the UK with just 19.4% (up from 18.9%) of volume.
The role of EUR/USD continued to decline in 2016 — its volume was down from 24.1% to 23.0% and it still leads all other currency pairs. USD/JPY volume declined too — from 18.3% to 17.7%.
GBP/USD, USD/CAD, and USD/JPY were the only major currency pairs that demonstrated growth of turnover in 2016 compared to 2013.
The table screenshot below shows all currency pairs that had at least 1% share in the daily turnover as of April 2016:
The updated version of the report will be released in December — some numbers may get adjusted but they will not be significantly different.
If you have some questions or comments regarding the way the global foreign exchange market is heading, please feel free to reply below.
