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The screens at the TMX Broadcast Centre in Toronto show the closing numbers of the TSX at + 32.42 on Wednesday, July 11, 2012.Matthew Sherwood/The Globe and Mail

The last thing the Canadian equity trading business needed was another quiet month. And in September, that's exactly what it got.

Equity trading has been a money-loser of late for most every brokerage firm. Industry wide, the equity trading business has been in the red for two of the last four quarters. But there were some signs that the third quarter may have been the bottom. In fact, trading on the TSX in August was actually up year over year. If only that momentum could have carried into September.

If only. Figures released Wednesday from the TMX Group show that trading on its main markets last month was down from August, and down sharply from September 2012.

TMX said that volume on the Toronto Stock Exchange, by far Canada's busiest market, was down 0.4 per cent from August and 10 per cent from September of 2012. That takes the year-to-date volume decline from an already soft 2012 to 7.7 per cent.

Activity on the TSX Venture Exchange also slowed, dropping 5 per cent from August and 18 per cent from September 2012. And Alpha, the trading system TMX bought as part of the Maple deal? Trading is down 48 per cent from a year ago.

For a Canadian securities industry that lost $160-millon on equity trading in the second quarter, according to figures released last week, this is a brutal way to end the third quarter.

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