World Federation of Exchanges

Aha! I've found another site with lots of details about financial trading. It the World Federation of Exchanges, an association of 52 regulated exchanges around the world. They have a whole pile of details about things like derivative trading. For example if you download their data sheet on Derivatives trading in 2009 and you do something that they don't apparently do, that is to say, add the numbers in each of the tables you can get the following data for total derivative operations.

You can see that the poor traders had a rough time in 2009 compared to 2008. They only managed to trade 1583 trillion dollars worth of derivatives, compared with 2118 trillion the year before. More than half the value comes from short term interest rate futures. I'm sure all this is absolutely vital for the world economy and is absolutely essential.

The WFE also provides several other data sets, that I compiled and added together in this second table. 

Clearly, the Non Derivative trading is much less important, but it was still over 100 trillion dollars in 2009. Not bad...

I can't help thinking that imposing a global financial transaction tax on all this would be a very good idea.