LONDON, March 13 The world's biggest financial market may be only half as big as you thought it was. That's the suggestion of a change in methodology by global settlement bank CLS which leaves out various double-counted and internal bank trades that for years have inflated estimates of the size of the global currency market.

But the similarity of those figures has always been purely coincidental, says CLS chief executive David Puth, and the U. Under the bonnet, nothing has changed, Puth says. But the decision by the company to switch focus, and its explanation of why, suggest that the lower figure may be a better representation of the reality of how bankers should think about an increasingly automated business. One, the company says, is hundreds of billions in completely internal trades which take place between different desks or units of banks and are not subject to settlement risk.

The other is the double-counting of similarly huge volumes of prime broker trades where banks act on behalf of major hedge fund and other investors and where both the original and a separate "give-up" trade is counted.

One question is whether some or all of these trades generate any risk, profit or loss and hence their value in discussions of the market as a business proposition or sector in which banks and others put capital. Editing by Robin Pomeroy. NEW YORK, June 21 Mylan N. Reuters is the news and media division of Thomson Reuters.

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