The world's largest futures exchange, Eurex, traded some 73.6m contracts in February, an increase of 29% on the same month last year. This resulted in average daily volume of 3.7m and brought the year-to-date volume for the exchange to 158m contracts in 2003.
Capital markets products account for over half the exchange's turnover, with 42m traded - the Euro Bund again the leading product with 19.3m traded, over 40% higher than the February 2002 figure.
Equity-based derivatives at Eurex showed a volume of some 31m contracts - 19.1m in equity index derivatives (up 50% on last year) and 11.8m in equity options. The leading contract in the equity index segment was the Dow Jones Euro Stoxx 50, with 8.1m contracts traded.
The second largest exchange last month was Euronext Liffe, where a total of 51.5m contracts traded, representing an underlying nominal average daily value of E990bn....