The London Stock Exchange today confirmed that transaction volumes are continuing to rise even as stock markets fall. The total number of UK trades on the Exchange increased to 3.89 million in July 2002, up by 56 per cent compared with 2.50 million in July 2001. Taking in to account 23 business days in July 2002 against 22 in the same month 2001, there was a 49 per cent increase in the average daily number of UK trades to 169,316 trades in July 2002, up from 113,586 in July 2001.
The rise in market volume was most notable on SETS, where there was a 103 per cent increase in the total number of trades: a record 2.63 million trades in July 2002 compared with 1.30 million in the corresponding period in 2001. As a result, SETS’ market share increased to 64 per cent for the month.
On 16 July 2002, there were 158,147 trades on SETS – a one-day record for SETS trading volumes.
Meanwhile, on the primary market there were 22 new issues during July 2002, 8 of which were IPOs. Of the IPOs, 3 were on the main market and 5 were on AIM, raising 385.6 million between them.