Intercontinental Exchange's December Volumes Up, Shares Gain

Shares of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE) inched up 0.8% in the last trading session after it reported solid average daily volume (ADV) for December. The metric for the month has increased 5.1% year over year to 5.1 million contracts. However, the same has sequentially declined 4.9%.

The year-over-year improvement was driven by Financials volume, rallying 13.7% to 2.3 million contracts per day. However, Commodities volume, which also averaged approximately at 2.8 million contracts per day, slipped 0.9% year over year. There were 20 trading days in December compared with a day extra in the year-ago month.

Energy volume decreased 2.6% to about 2.4 million contracts per day while Agricultural and Metals volume increased 8.3% to 0.3 million contracts. Interest Rate volume soared 37% to 1.7 million contracts per day whereas Equity Index volume declined 17.3% to 0.6 million contracts. Foreign exchange volume plunged 42% to nearly 0.3 million contracts.

Revenue per contract was 13 cents for December, down 7.1% year over year.

Shares of Intercontinental Exchange have underperformed the industry in a year. The stock has gained 27.7%, lagging the industry’s increase of 31%.

The company’s compelling product portfolio, risk management services, prudent acquisitions, timely achievement of cost synergies, strategic initiatives and a solid capital position should drive the shares higher and strengthen its growth profile. The company carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Recently, securities exchanges namely, CBOE Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:CBOE) , CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME) and MarketAxess Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:MKTX) also posted their volumes.

CBOE Global Markets’ December ADV of 7.1 million contracts improved nearly 12.7% year over year while CME Group’s ADV of 15.9 million contracts per day declined 2% year over year. MarketAxess has reported a trading volume of $104.4 billion for December 2017.

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