Press

The international derivatives exchange Eurex reported on Tuesday that it traded a total of 118 million contracts in January, up 24 percent on January 2005 and up 37 percent on the previous trading month. Approximately 5.4 million contracts per day were traded and settled in January. Open interest on Eurex, which as the number of open positions is an important indicator of future growth, continued to grow – totaling around 98 million contracts at the end of the month, an increase of approximately42 percent year on year (January 2005: 69.2 million contracts).

The strongest performance in January was once again delivered by the Fixed-Income Derivatives segment, with 59.4 million contracts traded. Over 25 million contracts were traded in the Euro-Bund-Future, which remained stable year on year. Trading volume in the 2 year Euro-Schatz Future was up approximately 30 percent year on year and with 14.3 million contracts traded, volumes surpassed those of the 5 year Euro-Bobl Future for the first time since 2002. The Euro-Bobl future contract traded 13.5 million contracts. Open interest for the 2-year Euro Schatz future in January surpassed that of both the Bobl and Schatz future with 1.6 million contracts, an increase of 100 percent on the previous year. The introduction of half tick pricing in the Euro-Schatz contract in mid 2004, thereby refining the pricing in the 2 year segment, has attracted new customers and resulted in strong growth in the contract.

Equity derivatives also showed strong growth in January. Turnover of 59 million contracts was recorded for equity-based derivatives in January, of which 34 million were attributable to equity index derivatives and approximately 25 million to equity options. The most heavily traded equity index derivatives were once again futures and options on the DJ Euro STOXX 50 Index. The futures contracts traded a total of 12.8 million contracts and the options had a record trading month of 11.6 million contracts, easily surpassing the previous record trading volume of 9.2 million contracts from October 2005.

The electronic trading platform Eurex Bonds, which rounds out Eurex’s fixed-income product range, recorded a volume of 12 billion euros (single counting) in January, a 13.6 percent increase on the previous month. Trading in Financials was successfully launched on January 16 with a total of 85.5 Million euros traded since launch.