A Bitcoin-tracking certificate was the most popular investment product on Frankfurt´s warrants-exchange in 2019. Mini-futures on the Dow Jones and on Barrick Gold were the most active leveraged products. The total trading volume in structured products was €12.3 billion, ten percent less than in 2018.

The total number of executed orders in structured products was 2.2 million in 2019. While this number was lower than in 2018, the average traded volume per order increased from €5,300 to €5,700. The turnover share of international participants also increased to more than 15 percent.

“With certificates, good returns were also possible in 2019, in some cases with lower risk than with a direct investment in shares”, said Simone Kahnt-Eckner, Board Member of Börse Frankfurt Zertifikate AG. “Investors also appreciate certificates as a vehicle for participating in assets that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to access. This is shown, for instance, by the popularity of the Bitcoin certificate. However, structured products with underlyings such as gold, silver or palladium were also in great demand, as well as indices on industry sectors that are currently in trend”.

With 2 million trades, the vast majority of these transactions were attributable to the leveraged products. Only about one tenth of these orders – 200,000 transactions – were executed in investment products, but these had an average order volume 7.5 times higher.

“Leveraged products enable the risk-conscious investor to optimise a portfolio’s performance with a low capital investment. At the same time, these products can be used to hedge equity positions or entire portfolios,” explains Florian Claus, Board Member of Börse Frankfurt Zertifikate AG. “In the current zero-interest rate environment, we can only emphasize again and again that, in the long run, there is no way to avoid saving with securities. And structured products are quite a sensible addition to portfolios that can be used to cover almost all conceivable scenarios.”

Further information on structured products at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange can be found online www.boerse-frankfurt.de/derivatives.