Press

Eurex, the international derivatives market, closed out 2005 with record turnover of 1.25 billion contracts (2004: 1.07 billion contracts), and thus remains the largest derivatives exchange in the world. Eurex grew by approximately 17 percent year-on-year in 2005. In the final month of last year 86.2 million contracts were traded, an increase of 7 percent on December 2004.

With around 42.4 million contracts, capital market products boasted the highest turnover among all product segments. This included 18 million contracts on the Euro-Bund Future, the strongest Eurex product, 11.3 million contracts on the Euro-Bobl Future and 10.2 million contracts contributed by the Euro-Schatz Future, which grew by 11 percent year-on-year.

Equity-based derivatives recorded turnover of 43.8 million contracts, 26.3 million of which related to equity index derivatives and 17.5 million to equity options. The equity index derivative with the highest turnover was the future on the DJ Euro STOXX 50 index, where volume rose by 15 percent year-on-year, to 12.1 million contracts. In terms of equity options, turnover for the most popular option on Allianz almost doubled year-on-year, to 2.9 million contracts.

In December, 10.5 billion euros (2004: 10.8 billion euros, single counting) was traded on the electronic trading platform Eurex Bonds, which rounds out Eurex’s range of Fixed Income products. For the full year 2005 a total of 149.3 billion Euro euros was traded, up 6 percent year-on-year.