The interest in forex trading has grown during March, partly due to the horrific tragedy in Japan. Forex Factory continues to lead, with the highest traffic. Here’s some data of what forex stats look like.
Arnaud Jeulin, owner of Mataf, has released his monthly summary of forex global statistics.Note that Jeulin bases his data on Google’s Double Click Ad Planner, which is considered relatively reliable, but still not accurate enough. There are many ways to measure web traffic, and there still isn’t a standardization in this field.
Also note that Jeulin doesn’t include in his summary all the forex sites out there. It’s just impossible. Nevertheless, I think that his picks are quite good.
After this background, let’s examine the data. The overall number of visitors is at around 18 million. Although lower from peaks reached in January (new year effect) and November (with the Irish crisis), this is a jump from February.
The main reason for the rise is the upsetting March 11th tragedy in Japan. This triggered a plunge in USD/JPY, which was followed by the coordinated international intervention. There’s a strong correlation between fear and forex.
According to Ad Planner, Forex Factory is the number one site in terms of visitors, with around 5 million. This continues a long term trend.
Another interesting finding is that forex social networks took a breather after nice gains. This is mostly due to a drop in traffic to MyFXBook. It’s still to be seen if this is a one time drop or a small fluctuation.
The doubts about the accuracy of the data come from various sources. Jeulin states that his actual traffic to Mataf was higher. It’s nice to see that he releases his data. Also FXStreet’s CEO, Francesc Riverola, publishes extensive statistical data on a monthly basis.
Here on Forex Crunch, I’ve connected Ad Planner with my statistics, so the data you see here is more accurate.
It will be interesting to see how Bernanke’s press conference together with the collapse of the dollar, will impact traffic for April. On the other hand, the Easter holiday, as well as the Royal Wedding, may have weakened interest in forex. We’ll see…