NYSE Liffe Europe : €474 trillion in 2013 - up 27.6%

I've just had a look at the transaction figures for NYSE Liffe. They really are very open about them - you can download all the details on their Monthly Statistics page. So I did. And here are the results for the period 2006-2013.

Activity peaked at over €500 trillion in 2010 but then dropped back to €372 trillion in 2012 - well it was a global financial crisis after all.

But I'm sure you'll all be relieved to hear that things have picked up nicely in 2013, with a total of €474 trillion. That's an impressive increase of 27.6% on 2012. Well done!

There are some other interesting things to extract from the data. Firstly, since the €474 trillion was achieved with 113 million transactions, that means that an average transaction was worth an impressive €4.19 million.

But there another interesing gem here. It's the Premium Turnover which was €46.3 billion in 2013. That's 0.01% of the total transaction value.

Now, if you remember, last week I showed you the total Premium value for 2013 for that other major global player - the Options Clearing Corporation. I got a value of $1.2 trillion in Premiums. But when I asked the nice guy at OCC what total volume that corresponded to, he unfortunately stopped corresponding with me.

But, if we take the Premium value for NYSE Liffe (namely 0.01%), this presumably means that we can multiply up the $1.2 trillion number by 10,000 to get the true value of financial transactions handled by OCC. And the result is.... $12 quadrillion. Gulp.

Just think. If the US government was to tax those transactions at a rate of 0.025% they could abolish every other tax in existence, because all the other taxes raise less than $3 trillion a year.

Even the Tea-Party should love that one.