The positive February for bitcoin futures, both in terms of volumes and prices, has allowed CME Group to achieve significant trading results:
“Yesterday (Feb 19th) set a new record with 18,338 contracts traded, this is equivalent to 91,690 bitcoin or $360MN… Q1 2019 is off to a strong start, ADV has improved to 4,630 contracts (23,150 equivalent bitcoin), up ~13% from Q4 2018 while [open interest] rose to 4,076 contracts, an improvement of 21.5% over Q4 2018”.
The bitcoins traded by the CME Group account for approximately 4% of the volumes traded on exchanges on a daily basis. This value is starting to be interesting and shows that the interest of the financial market is growing for these financial tools.
In addition, there has been an increase in the number of so-called LOIH, Large Open Interest Holder, which are operators with at least 25 BTCs in the form of futures contracts. Moreover, the month of January saw a 20% increase in the volume of daily contracts traded.
As for the prices, these are at the highest values of 2019, excluding January 7th.
The price of the futures on bitcoin is interesting, but it should also be noted that this slavishly follows the effective price of the virtual currency.
The deviation is minimal compared to the price of the virtual currency and does not show particular forecasting capacity compared to spot prices on the market.
However, bitcoin futures allow ordinary financial institutions to operate with the virtual currency without coming into direct possession of it, which could cause accounting problems.
