In the past couple of weeks, market volatility has served to propel Forex trading activities in Japan. This being the case, a total of 491.6 trillion in OTC retail Forex volumes were registered. These are details emanating from the Futures Financial Association of Japan (FFAJ).

On Monday 14th September, 2015, the FFAJ released its well documented monthly operating metrics focusing on members that offer Forex and binary options trading services over the counter and have been in operation for quite some time, including the past month of August 2015.

In the original analysis, it was realized that the binary options and Forex segments displayed a myriad of differing results in August. Ideally, Forex volumes had grown from the recent July 2015 levels. On the other hand, binary options volumes feel slightly lower. This is a contradictory state of affairs considering that these two elements of investment, in any ideal situation ought to work in tandem with each other. Therefore, binary options trading is a major concern in Japan today. With the volumes dropping to a major low this year, those investing in them need to revise their expectations or think otherwise.

As much as the Forex segment has been quite sustainable over the years, that is not just the case in Japan but also in other parts of the world. Therefore, it is a hot topic in the investment circles nowadays. It is thus important to have a good review of the Forex segment metrics and what they mean for Japan in this regard.

Forex segment metrics

In the first case, a total of 55 members of the Futures Financial Association of Japan filed their own OTC reports for the month of August 2015 with the regulator. That number of members was much lower compared with the 56 companies that had given out their reports back in July 2015.

From the data contained in those OTC Forex reports, it was realized that their OTC retail Forex marginal trading volumes had amounted to 491.6 trillion Japanese Yen. This represented a rise of close to 2.5% up from the initial 479.3 trillion Japanese Yen that was recorded back in the month of July 2015.

Judging through the latest Forex trading metrics, the three mostly traded currency pairs for the OTC were EUR/USD, USD/JPY and AUD/JPY. That being the case, the steepest month-on-month increase with regards to trading volumes was registered by the ZAR/JPY currency pair with a margin of +38.5%.

Binary options statistics for August 2015

To start with, a total of 8 members of the Futures Financial Association of Japan gave reports of different sorts of data regarding their OTC binary options. Apparently, the binary options trading volumes for the month of August were almost similar to the ones of July 2015.

On the other hand, the month of August saw a total of 48.73 billion Japanese Yen registered in binary options trading volumes. These amounts were largely unchanged from what was reported in July 2015 but that represented a drop of 29% in trade volumes from the same time in the year 2014.

Notably, trading payments seem to have been impacted on a monthly basis since they were falling every month. This amounted to 23.7 billion Japanese Yen in the month of August 2015, coming down from the results that were registered in July 2015.

It is also important to note that the active account numbers also dropped considerably, thereby amounting to 14, 414 at the end of the month of August. This was a decrease from the 14, 642 that were registered in July 2015. There are many other details that can be tied to this report but one thing that is for sure is that binary options are on a downward trend in Japan and something urgent really has to be done.