Global Derivatives: methodology

This page documents /derivatives: the three BIS datasets behind it, the exact cuts each exhibit plots, the measurement conventions (notional vs gross market value vs gross credit exposure, net-net vs net-gross, the 200% currency convention), the vintage caveats, the build-time verification, and the license under which the data is displayed.

What this layer is, and is not

/derivatives measures the global derivatives market from the BIS's free statistical collections: how much notional principal is outstanding over the counter and on exchanges, what those positions are worth at market prices, and how much foreign exchange turns over daily. It is a market-level layer: every series is an aggregate exactly as compiled by the BIS from dealer reporting. No position-level, firm-level, or trade-level data exists in these collections or is carried here. Trader-class positioning in US futures lives separately on /positioning (CFTC COT); interest-rate levels on /rates.

Sources

All three datasets come from the BIS Data Portal's static bulk endpoint (https://data.bis.org/static/bulk/<DATASET>_csv_flat.zip), the same route as the estate's other BIS pulls (credit gap, policy rates, LBS, debt securities), fetched and normalized by scripts/fetch_bis_derivatives.py into three parquets:

Naming note: the OTC flow is WS_OTC_DERIV2; WS_OTC_DERIV without the "2" does not exist (404, verified 2026-07-18). All values in all three files are USD millions, asserted at ingest from the files' own unit columns. Two file quirks are handled and documented in the fetch script: the exchange-traded file's value column header is mislabeled ("OBS_VALUE:Observation Status"), and its observation rows carry no unit fields (the unit is backfilled from the file's own series-definition rows, all of which read USD, millions).

Survey design

• OTC outstanding (semiannual). End-June and end-December positions of dealers in 12 jurisdictions (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States), consolidated worldwide, adjusted for inter-dealer double counting. Every three years the Triennial Survey widens coverage to dealers in more than 30 additional jurisdictions; between Triennials the BIS estimates those dealers' positions inside the semiannual aggregates. The page uses the all-countries aggregate (DER_REP_CTY = 5J), the only reporting-country cut this dataflow serves.
• Exchange-traded (quarterly/monthly). Notional open interest and turnover on organised exchanges, compiled by the BIS from exchange data. Covers foreign exchange and interest-rate contracts only; equity and commodity exchange contracts are outside this BIS dataset, which is why the page's exchange-traded section is FX + rates only.
• Triennial FX turnover. Daily averages for the April of each survey year, reported by dealers in 52 jurisdictions in the April 2025 round. The turnover figures include spot, which is not a derivative; the survey measures the whole FX market and the page says so. The dataflow also carries OTC interest-rate turnover; that leg is not ingested (the parquet is cut to DER_RISK = B, foreign exchange).

The three OTC measures

Quoted from the BIS's explanatory notes, which the page's framing follows:

• Notional amounts outstanding "provide a measure of market size and a reference from which contractual payments are determined in derivatives markets. However, such amounts are generally not those truly at risk." (BIS statistical release explanatory notes.)
• Gross market value: the sum of the absolute replacement values of all open contracts at reporting-date prices.
• Gross credit exposure: "gross market value minus amounts netted with the same counterparty across all risk categories under legally enforceable bilateral netting agreements"; it "provides a measure of exposure to counterparty credit risk (before collateral)." (BIS Data Portal glossary.)

The exhibits and their cuts

All exhibits use the totals cut unless stated: total instruments and counterparties, all-countries aggregate, total underlying sector, maturity, rating, and currency legs. Queries live in src/lib/derivatives.ts; every number in the page prose is computed from them at build.

1. Notional by risk category (semiannual): the six categories interest rate (D), foreign exchange (B), credit (T), equity-linked (E), commodities (J), other (U). B excludes gold, which the survey books under commodities (J = gold + other precious metals + other commodities, verified additive in the raw data). The six are asserted at build to sum to the survey's own all-risk total (A) within 0.01%.
2. Gross market value and gross credit exposure (semiannual): all-risk totals of measures D and H.
3. The CDS arc (semiannual from 2004-S2, when the survey began collecting CDS): instrument U (all CDS), V (single-name), W (multi-name). Nothing before 2004-S2 is backfilled.
4. Exchange-traded open interest (quarterly): interest-rate futures and options and total FX contracts, all exchanges, all currencies. This chart carries the level/YoY/log transform bar; the semiannual and survey-year charts do not (the transform grammar's year-over-year match is defined for its five listed frequencies, and half-yearly or triennial observations are not among them).
5. FX turnover by instrument (survey years): net-net basis. Spot, outright forwards, FX swaps, currency swaps, options sum to the total with a small other-products residual (asserted within 0.1%); non-deliverable forwards are an of-which of outright forwards and are not double-drawn.
6. Currency shares: each currency's turnover with that currency on one side of the trade, divided by total turnover. Because every trade has two currency legs, shares across all currencies sum to 200% (a single currency's ceiling is 100%). This is the BIS's own convention; the USD share of 89.1% in April 2025 means the dollar was on one side of 89.1% of all trades.
7. Trading centers: turnover by the country of the sales desk, net-gross basis, the by-country convention (adjusted for local, but not cross-border, inter-dealer double counting). Country figures therefore sum to more than the global net-net total, and shares on the page are of the all-countries net-gross total.

Basis conventions (Triennial)

• net-net: adjusted for both local and cross-border inter-dealer double counting. Used for all global totals, instruments, and currency shares.
• net-gross: adjusted for local inter-dealer double counting only. The convention for by-country tables, used in the centers table.

Vintages

• The 2025 Triennial figures on the page are the final data released with the June 2026 BIS Quarterly Review (the bulk file's vintage). The preliminary release of 30 September 2025 headlined $9.6 trillion per day and an 89.2% USD share; the final data revise these to $9.51 trillion and 89.1%, and the page notes the revision where it quotes the total.
• OTC outstanding data are revised by reporters between releases; the half-year series plotted is the current vintage as served.

Verification anchors (2026-07-18)

• OTC total notional, end-June 2025: parquet 845,690,019.288 USD mn ($845.7tn) vs the BIS commentary "OTC derivatives statistics at end-June 2025": "rose to $846 trillion at June 2025". Match at published rounding.
• OTC gross market value, end-June 2025: parquet $21.81tn vs the same commentary's "$21.8 trillion". Exact at published precision.
• Triennial 2025 net-net total: parquet 9,510,240.332703 USD mn vs the BIS's final annex table (rpfx25_fx_annex_tables.xlsx, sheet T_01_01, "Total, net-net basis"): 9510240.332703. Exact to all published decimals; the USD leg (8,471,519.373276) is likewise exact.
• Triennial 2022: parquet $7.47tn total and 88.4% USD share vs BIS published "$7.5 trillion" and "88.4% in 2022". Match at published rounding.

Refresh cadence

The OTC survey publishes twice a year (roughly May and November-December, with a five-to-six-month lag); exchange-traded tables update quarterly; the Triennial arrives every three years (next survey 2028). The estate's refresh pipeline re-pulls all three in its annual tier (scripts/refresh.sh), the nearest standing cadence; a mid-year manual run of scripts/fetch_bis_derivatives.py picks up the interim OTC release.

License

BIS terms and conditions (https://www.bis.org/terms_conditions.htm): BIS statistics may be used, reproduced and distributed with attribution ("Source: BIS"). In line with this site's standing no-redistribution policy, the page displays derived aggregates with attribution only; the underlying bulk files are not re-served. Citation: Bank for International Settlements, BIS Data Portal (data.bis.org), datasets WS_OTC_DERIV2, WS_XTD_DERIV, WS_DER_OTC_TOV.