Eurex traded and cleared 79 million contracts in April. This is a 40 per cent increase over the April 2002 volumefor the exchange and is equivalent to an average of 4 million contracts a day. The market participants, who are connected to Eurex worldwide from 650 locations, turned over a total of some 344 million contracts during the first four months of 2003.
The highest-turnover segment in April was the fixed-income products with 43 million contracts traded, over half of the total volume at Eurex. The Euro-Bund future was again the leading product with 18.6 million contracts traded, 43 per cent more than the number traded in April the year before. In the Euro-Bobl future, 11.3 million contracts changed hands, a 38 percent increase against April 2002. Volume in the Euro-Schatz future, with over 9 million contracts traded, was roughly 15 percent higher than in April 2002.
Eurex Bonds, the electronic trading platform in the fixed-income segment, had another increase in trading activity in April 2003. With Euros 10.9 billion in turnover (single counting) in April, Eurex Bonds posted an increase of 62> per cent compared with the previous year’s turnover for the month.
In equity-based derivatives, more than 35 million contracts were traded at Eurex in April, consisting of 19.9 million contracts in the equity-index derivatives segment and 15.6 million contracts in the equity options segment, a new record on a monthly basis (the previous record was 15.2 million contracts in January 2003). The volume traded in equity-index derivatives was over 75 percent higher year on year. The top contract in equity-index derivatives again in April was the futures contract on the DJ Euro STOXX 50 index with 8.3 million contracts traded, which corresponds to growth in volume of 130 percent against April 2002. In the option on the DJ Euro STOXX 50 index, volume was even 167 percent higher, with 4.7 million contracts traded. The strongest contract in the equity options at Eurex in April was the option on Allianz with 2.9 million contracts traded, setting a new record (previous record: 1.9 million contracts, in March 2003).
In the equity options segment, Dutch and French equity options showed high growth rates in April: With 533 million Dutch equity option contracts traded, the world’s leading equity options exchange turned over more than half a million contracts in a month for the first time, and more than five times as many as the number traded in April 2002. Volume in the French equity options at Eurex, with 73,000 contracts traded, quadrupled compared with the previous year’s April figure and achieved a market share of about 6.5 per cent of the total market in French equity options in terms of the nominal value of the equity options traded (the nominal value of the transactions).