FFAJ Reports Japans’s Retail FX Trading Is On The Decline

The Financial Futures Association of Japan (FFAJ) has just released some worrying figures on the forex margin trading numbers (over-the-counter) for September. The figures show a continued decline of trading among members of the association. This is the fourth month in a row that sales have fallen.

The numbers show that the 53 members of the association posted a total over-counter activity of ¥266 trillion. This is equivalent to $2.4 trillion. This may seem like a large amount – but in August, the FFAJ posted a total trading activity of ¥298 trillion. That is a drop of more than ¥20 trillion.

This drop continues a downward trend in trading that has been noticed since May when the monthly trading volume was still at a high of ¥371 trillion. OTC activity has been slowly going down despite the fact that there had been a constant amount of over-the-counter operators in the business.

The drop has been noticeable in the amount of the fall off. June saw a 12 percent drop in activity, while July saw only a 7.61 drop. August was the kindest on the market, with only a 1 percent difference from the previous month.

Going into dollar and yen trading, the market did not do any better. September saw a total of ¥228 trillion being traded, which is an 11.3 percent loss from August's ¥258 trillion. On-exchange contracts also declined by 17.2 percent, reaching only ¥2.1 trillion.

Binary Options Trading Also Drops

The FFAJ also monitors binary options and the figures from that market are also worrying. Binary options traded ¥33.1 billion, which is still a big number but that is nevertheless a 13 percent drop from August's ¥37.5 billion.

The number of trading payments is down as well. September had 18.8 billion payments, while August had 20.6 billion. This is despite the fact that there has been an 11,423 increase in binary options trading accounts among FFAJ members.

The FFAJ has been around since 1989 and has been providing solid market data on Japan's futures market. Their reports for this year have been pretty dismal, indicating an industry on the decline as the market gets hit by the downturn in the world economy.

There are some bright spots though. Forex overseas futures contracts saw a jump in the second quarter of this year, with 105,751 contracts being traded in total. This is a 102.84 percent increase from the first quarter and it will be interesting to see how it performed in the third quarter.

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