Trading on Euronext's cash markets is up by 8% year-to-date: a total of more than 97 million transactions have been registered over the first eight months of the year. The almost 575,000 transactions registered on a daily average basis since January state a growth of 8.5% on the same period last year.
Year-on-year, the daily average number of cash trades is up 1% this month, coming close to 500,000 a day; the total number of transactions, 10.4 million in August, is slightly down compared to the same month last year due to a shorter number of trading days in August 2003 compared to August 2002.
Shares
Transactions in shares have grown in about the same proportions year-to-date, by more than 9% in total and by almost 10% daily on average: this brings to close to 92 million the number of trades in shares since the beginning of the year. The 470,000 daily transactions registered in shares in August show an increase of 2.2 % compared to the same month last year.
Trackers
More than 304,000 trades have been registered in trackers since January, 1800 daily on average: an increase of 43.3% year-to-date. Over 25,000 transactions were totalled in August.
Derivatives products
Euronext.liffe, the international derivatives business of Euronext, has traded 49 million futures and options contracts in August 2003, with an average daily volume of 2.3 million contracts.
Year-to-date, Euronext.liffe has traded 458 million contracts with an average daily volume of 2.7 million.
Volumes on interest-rate products were up 51% year-to-date, with over 20 million contracts traded in August. In this sector, short-term interest rate products (the Euribor, Short Sterling and Euroswiss contracts) grew by 54%.
In equity products, over 27 million contracts were traded, comprising 17 million contracts in individual equity products and 10 million in equity index derivatives.
Within this product sector, the FTSEurofirst equity index futures, launched on June 23 2003, are showing encouraging volumes for such a new product. Over the past four weeks, FTSEurofirst 80 index futures has traded, on an average weekly basis 11,400 contracts with the FTSEurofirst 100 index futures trading 5,900 contracts on the same basis. The indices were developed by Euronext in partnership with FTSE, after extensive customer consultation revealed limitations in the ability of existing available products to cope with the increasingly cross-border, sectoral trading strategies.
