Press

One year after trading was launched in derivatives on the Dow Jones STOXX indices in the middle of June last year, Eurex, the German-Swiss derivatives market, has developed into the main European trading place for these products: 99 percent of all derivatives products on these new equity indices are now traded at Eurex. At the same time, the underlying indices have also advanced to become the leading indices in the European competition: The STOXX indices account for about 95 percent of the derivatives turnover.

The average daily trading volume in the STOXX derivatives at Eurex has increased from about 2,600 contracts when they were launched in June 1998 to about 47,500 contracts in June 1999. In the meantime, the focus of the segment in European index derivatives has clearly shifted to the Dow Jones Euro-STOXX products, which make up about 99 percent of the Eurex turnover in this segment and about 96 percent of the volume traded on all European indices. The Dow Jones Euro-STOXX index, in contrast to the Dow Jones STOXX, does not comprise companies from the UK, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Greece and Switzerland.

A total of more than 3 million contracts on the Euro-STOXX have been traded since the market launch in June 1998. As compared with some 490,000 contracts traded last year, about 2.6 million futures and options on this index had already been traded by 06/21/1999.