This annual report by the FIA is an interesting read for futures traders. Shows where the trading activity is and how it's changed since the previous year. If you want to keep it for reference, suggest you save the PDF to your local drive because I don't know how long this link will work. http://marketvoicestage.commonworkspace.com/sites/default/files/MARCH_2017_VOLUME_SURVEY.pdf
Thanks good information. Am not surprised at much of it though, like to see options increase to make for tighter spreads, so percentages are misleading dealing with options, could show huge increase and still not be much of actual increase. But I have noticed much more trading in Eurodollar trading and options have steadily increased in it as well, with 7 years being so high, you either learned how to trade them or made nothing in this market. Selling highs gets old and made no sense to hedge, but we all pretty much have systems and keep selling highs till price decides to head down in 2015. Selling the deep rallies/hedge to add on to position as huge decline is expected. One of the best deals around are all the spreads you can do on them as futures trades to ten years out. Of all the markets I like to trade, Eurodollars is best, low margins and still be able to do hourly systems but have to do overnight for me, sometimes goes sideways for hours.
I have to say... do the comparisons make any sense? I mean, in the equity products... there are lots of differences in underlying size and currency... Would be more interesting to see dollar-volume...
From the perspective of a trader, I'm interested in contracts that have good liquidity and are efficient to trade (low bid/ask spread). So contract volume works for me. From the perspective of the FIA and their sell-side constituents, they are interested in fees. So contract volume works for them. I'm not sure how dollar-volume is helpful for futures (& options) contracts. As traders, we only put up margin to trade, so it's not like traditional measures of money flow apply. And the notional values of different contracts varies quite a bit. Consider the high notional value of a single Eurodollar contract vs the low margin requirement. So I'm not sure what comparisons could be made on dollar-volume with a contract like this. If you're referring to equity products exclusively, I think dollar-volume is a key metric for trading in a Reg T account. But for futures, I don't see how it applies.
We're discussing trading activity correct? I wonder why Nifty is high up in the equities... you might think it's very liquid... but guess again... Margin is related not to units but to exposure. One Nifty future has about 500 margin req, while ES about 6k. I'm not necessarily trying to compare interest rate products with commodity futures.. or with equity... but within a segment, dollar volume says way more than just contracts. I don't look at my used margin, because I look at my dollar exposure. If I trade 10 ES futures I know it's a bit over 1 mln... I don't care about the 60k margin... I care about what I make if it goes up 1%...