ICAP, an interdealer broker, has announced that daily electronic broking volumes exceeded $1 trillion ($1,000 billion) on both Thursday June 7 and Friday June 8. This is the second time this year that activity on ICAP's electronic platforms has reached these levels, the last similar period being late February/early March 2007.
Highly volatile market conditions are driving volume growth on ICAP's spot foreign exchange platform EBS and fixed income platform BrokerTec, the firm says. A total of $259 billion in US Treasury products changed hands on the BrokerTec platform on Thursday. On Friday, the total volume on the EBS platform in spot foreign exchange was $253 billion. European repo trading on BrokerTec also reached record levels of €261 billion at the end of May.
Voice broking volumes in the global interest rate swap market have also risen dramatically on the back of the market volatility with ICAP's volumes on Thursday exceeding €280 billion.
The exceptional level of volatility in the past week was widely believed to have been caused by interest rate rises and corresponding increase in bond yields.