The current extremely volatile market environment has led to enormous increases in contract and quote volume on Eurex Exchange in the last two weeks. New records were set in some benchmark products, such as futures and options on the EURO STOXX 50 and DAX. The total average daily trading volume (ADV) in August is at an annual high of almost 12 million contracts, compared to the yearly ADV of 8.4 million contracts. The growth in the trading and clearing volume was accompanied by an even greater rise in system transactions and quotes handled by the system. At the beginning of last week, the number of quotes even reached a new peak of 1.2 billion on a single day.
Despite the massive rise in volumes, Eurex Group’s IT systems constantly fulfilled its role as designed and provided well-functioning markets thus ensuring market integrity. The on-going and constant enhancement of and investment into Eurex Group’s IT infrastructure were the reasons that the system availability and data throughput at Eurex Exchange and Eurex Clearing remained stable – trading and clearing worked without any frictions or interruptions. The additional transaction load had no effect on the latency or response times of the Eurex systems.
Eurex not only offers high performance and stable trading opportunities for its participants; its numerous risk management services also ensure that participants can optimally manage their individual risks – even in very volatile market situations. Risk management in real time using the Enhanced Risk Solution interface and the numerous pre- and post-trade functionalities ensure that participants can identify risks at an early stage and quickly avoid excessive exposure.
The safety mechanisms that have been implemented also guarantee market integrity and orderly trading. These include volatility interruption, which allows a short-term interruption of trading in affected products in the event of high volatility, thus enabling market participants to react appropriately to excessive price volatility.
