Cboe FX Yearly Recap and Look Ahead

As we embark on a new year, the Cboe FX team recaps some of its key 2021 achievements and provides an update on what to expect in 2022 to help support your FX trading needs.

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continued to disrupt our lives both personally and professionally, your continued support helped us to navigate these challenges and continue to grow. 

The year just gone…

Cboe FX continued to go from strength to strength in 2021 and in spot FX it was our best year on record, with a market share of 16.6%*, compared to 16.1% in 2020.

Our Full Amount offering, which provides clients with a solution for larger order risk transference with low market impact, had another strong year. Full Amount ADV topped $9.6 billion in 2021, representing a 22.2% increase year-over-year. 

We continue to publish more granular volume and liquidity statistics on our website, including 30-day rolling firm volumes and hourly/daily non-firm fill rates. Firm trading accounted for 43.3% of total volume executed on the Cboe FX ECN at its peak (December) and 40.4% on average in 2021, while non-firm fill rates reached 89% for the year.

Growth in non-deliverable forward (NDF) volumes on Cboe SEF also were particularly strong, with annual ADV of $406 million, compared with $92 million in 2020. The SEF had its first trading day in excess of $1bn for NDFs in September, with a monthly high ADV watermark of $902 million in October.

Cboe SEF ADV by Quarter

Fourth-Quarter 2021 ADV by Instrument

We believe our market share growth was the result of our continued focus on innovation and continuous enhancement of our liquidity solutions, an area where we have really differentiated ourselves from the competition. On that note, in September, we launched a hosted algorithmic execution service in collaboration with leading electronic liquidity provider XTX Markets Limited (XTX Algo). This service meets the growing demand for algorithmic execution in FX markets and has helped to round out our suite of FX services, covering all aspects of how our clients interact in the market.

Over the last two years we have listened to our client base and launched products such as pegs, midmatch and Cboe FX Central to facilitate spot execution. Furthermore, in response to our clients needs for reliable market data we have launched Cboe FX Replay in Q1 2021, which has proved to be a great success.

... and looking ahead

There is likely to be continued uncertainty in the year ahead, as a result of the disruption caused by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. But we will remain focused on bringing innovative solutions and choice to market to help you achieve your FX trading strategies.

In this regard, we will keep innovating in the spot market and are also looking to introduce new order types for NDFs, both on Cboe SEF and Cboe Swiss, our ‘off-SEF’ offering.

We also recently announced plans to launch an interdealer market for US Treasuries in mid 2022, subject to regulatory approval. This is a hugely exciting development that will bring the best of what we do in FX to the US Treasuries market in terms of a quantitative approach to liquidity curation and matching technology. We will be introducing an innovative dealer-to-dealer Full Amount platform to address a market need for effective large-size risk transference which is not currently met by incumbents. We are targeting a launch of On-the-Run Treasuries for Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) clearing members in Q2 2022.** Stay tuned for more information on this initiative in the coming months.

We remain grateful for your business and continued support, and we are looking forward to working with you in 2022.

* Market Share represents Cboe FX volume divided by the total volume of publicly reporting spot FX venues: Cboe FX, EBS, Refinitiv and EuronextFX. 

** Subject to regulatory review and approval.