High levels of volatility in global stock markets last week, triggered by Standard & Poor’s downgrade of US debt and concerns over the eurozone, led to the third highest number of daily trades at the London Stock Exchange.

There were 1.54 million trades carried out on the LSE on Tuesday August 9, according to data from the UK exchange operator. This amounted to almost three times the average daily trading volume so far this year, which had been around 642,000 trades per day to the end of July.