LIFFE Trades £169 Billion A Day In November 1999

In November the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) remained Europe's largest exchange by value. The average daily nominal value of contracts traded on LIFFE was £169 billion (273 billion) during November 1999 and the total nominal value traded for the month was £3,728 billion (6,039 billion). Open interest, a key indicator of liquidity and long term use of the market, stood at 6,448,675 contracts on 30 November 1999, an increase of 3% from 31 October 1999. Hugh Freedberg, LIFFE's Chief Executive, said "As expected, trading activity is beginning to decline as we approach Y2K and it's likely we'll see a further decline in trading across all markets towards the year end. Both LIFFE's equity and commodity products have grown significantly this year. Equity products have increased by 26% and commodities by 12%. The volume in LIFFE's commodities contracts in 1999 already exceeds total annual volumes for each year since 1991 when the current portfolio of products was created." From January to November 1999 a total of 112,487,876 contracts were traded at LIFFE, with a total value of £48,292 billion (78,233 billion) traded.