EU Securities Markets ESMA Annual Statistical Report 2021
01/06/2022 ESMA Visit source websiteExecutive summary
Editorial note
Brexit implications for EU securities market statistics: The UK was a central part of the European securities market, and remains an important third-country market after the country has left the EU. Starting with this edition of this ASR series, we show statistics of the European securities markets after Brexit, i.e. not containing UK data. The comparability with statistics we had published in earlier publications is, therefore, highly limited. In particular, the approach is likely to underestimate OTC trading for all instruments, since many European investment firms reported to UK reporting service providers in 2020, whose reports are not included when presenting the EEA30. As expected, the impact of taking out UK data on European securities market statistics is profound, as the simple example of the aggregate size of the market shows: the total traded volumes in the EEA30 in 2020 is EUR 9tn for equity markets, and EUR 18tn for bond markets, or around one-fifth of the respective EUR 27tn and EUR 101tn we reported for 2019 when presenting the EEA31, i.e. when the UK was still a member of the EU. Against this background we are particularly eager to show in this report in detail the various facets of EU securities trading in 2020 when the UK was not a member of the EU anymore, but still participated in the Single Financial Market. We, therefore, present this impact in three dedicated sub-chapters in each section of this report, and provide an additional table on essential statistics including UK data.