South Korea boasts the world’s largest market for equity derivatives by number of contracts traded, with 2.7bn stock index options contracts traded in 2008, according to the World Federation of Exchanges. This compares with 514m traded on Eurex, the next biggest market on that measure. Private traders, encouraged by high leverage gains and low trading costs, were the main drivers of the market when stock index derivative products were introduced in 1996, accounting for almost 80 per cent of trades by volume.
Source: FT