Jan 18, 2021
Eurex
Eurex Quarterly Equity News Q4/2020
Market wrap-up
We all will keep 2020 as an unprecedent year in mind. From a market and equity derivatives perspective the year can be divided into two parts. During the first half year we experienced a unique market environment with high volatility and sudden shifts in operational trading setups. Even more disruptive for the equity options segment was certainly the uncertainty around postponed AGMs and the subsequent fallouts or reductions in dividend payments. The second half year was rather dominated by the massive rally in equity markets firstly driven by the technology sector and after the vaccine approvals also supported by cyclicals and financials. For the equity options segments all those developments offered a lot of opportunities which is reflected in an overall increase in volumes in 2020 of 2%. We’d like to express again our gratitude to our on-screen and off-book liquidity providers and highlight their exceptional performance. Thanks to them, we saw orderly and functioning markets, able to absorb extraordinarily high volumes, despite difficult operational circumstances.
In 2021 we start with the launch of a new options segment by listing equity options on Xetra listed US underlyings, denominated in EUR. Options will be listed on: Tesla, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix and Microsoft. The offering will allow customers to trade US equity options during European hours on a regulated European trading platform and the benefits of cross margin efficiencies and we are very happy to have support from our liquidity providers to actively quote the segment.
On-screen liquidity has fairly stabilized in the course of 2020 after some disrupted weeks around March/April. Especially the available BBO volumes of the German and the Swiss segment is back at it’s highs compared to the previous year accompanied by stable spreads.
Updates on our Equity Derivatives
Part 1: The impact of ICB on STOXX indices
Giulio Castelli, Head of Benchmarks, Strategies and Specialty Themes at Qontigo and Zubin Ramdarshan, Head of Equity and Index Product Design at Eurex, provide their understanding of how to understand what the new indices mean for very popular derivatives.
Part 2: The impact of ICB on indices and related derivatives
Stephan Flaegel from Qontigo and Randolf Roth from Eurex are talking about the new Industry Classification Benchmark (ICB) structure and its impact on indices and related derivatives. The main discussion points were the general impact and how the transition from the old to new ICB classifications has evolved.
