The latest monthly figures from Japanese brokerage DMM, are signaling that trading volumes in March have stabilized. The total monthly figure amounted to $874 billion (¥108.8 trillion), which is higher by almost 3% when compared to February. The previous month marked a substantial decline after 5 consecutive months of steady increases.
Whilst foreign exchange volatility in March persisted, it was widely tilted away from the main volumes driver on the Japanese market – the USD/JPY currency pair. The majority of traders in Japan have had to run to other pairs to look for big moves, namely the single european currency.
Last week, the Tokyo Financial Exchange reported that trading volumes in the EUR/USD and the EUR/JPY pairs increased materially. FortuneZ estimations are that these same pairs have been popular with retail traders in Japan in March.
DMM has been in close contention with another big Japanese brokerage GMO Click for the top spot by total monthly trading volumes in the country. As seen on the figures below, activity of the Japanese retail investors has been substantially higher than last March. This figure is about 68% higher and provided that trading activity remains stable should increase further.
Due to the lower trading volumes in the first half of 2014 for a protracted period of time into the summer months, we could see volumes more than doubling year-on-year in the coming months.
