Press

Eurex, the European derivatives market, achieved a volume of 30.5 million contracts traded in April, topping the April 1999 volume by 17 percent. Eurex has already traded more than 152 million contracts during the first four months of the current year.

The Bund future was the world's most heavily traded futures contract for another month in a row, with 10.9 million of these contracts traded at Eurex. Year on year, Bund futures volume grew 4 percent, increasing by 450,000 contracts. In options on the Bund future, Eurex sur-passed the previous year's volume by more than 44 percent, with 2.6 million contracts traded in April. In the Bobl future, over 3.6 million contracts were traded in April, 20 percent higher than the number traded during the same month of last year. About 2.5 million contracts were traded in the Schatz future, which corresponds to an increase of more than 180 percent against the previous year. A total of about 20 million contracts were traded in the Capital Market Products segment, 21.4 percent more than in April 1999.

In index derivatives, the Eurex volume remained at its high level in April, with some 4.8 million contracts traded. Turnover in the derivatives on the Dow Jones Euro STOXX 50 index came to roughly 1.2 million contracts traded, exceeding the April 1999 volume by 157 percent in the options and 287 percent in the futures.

In the Finnish products, the options on Nokia set a new record, with over 65,000 contracts traded; this corresponds to an increase of 75 percent over the previous month's figure. A total of about 100,000 contracts on Finnish stock options were traded in April.