Volume in forex: what tick volume is and how to read it

Stock traders lean on volume all the time. Forex traders open the volume panel in MetaTrader and find numbers that look like volume but mean something else. Understanding the difference stops you from reading too much into them, and from throwing away a useful tool.

Why spot forex has no real volume

Stocks trade on exchanges, and every share that changes hands is counted in one consolidated number. Spot forex trades over the counter, between banks, brokers and liquidity providers all over the world. No single place sees every trade, so no one can publish the true traded volume of EUR/USD.

What MT4 and MT5 show instead

The volume bars in MetaTrader are tick volume: the number of times the price changed during that candle, as seen by your broker. A busy candle has many small price updates, a quiet candle has few. So tick volume measures activity, not size.

Two consequences follow:

• It is broker-specific. Two brokers will show different tick volume for the same candle, because they use different price feeds. Compare a pair with itself on one broker, never across brokers.
• It follows the clock. Activity rises when London opens, peaks while London and New York overlap, and drops in the late US and Asian sessions. A tick-volume spike at the London open is normal, not a signal.

How to use it anyway

Tick volume tends to rise and fall with real trading activity, so it is useful in relative terms. Compare the current candle with the average of the last 20 candles of the same timeframe. A breakout candle with tick volume at two or three times that average carries more conviction than one at half the average.

Comparing against the same session is even better: a 10:00 London candle against previous 10:00 London candles removes most of the time-of-day effect.

When you need real volume

Currency futures trade on the CME and report real, exchange-wide volume. The euro future (6E) tracks EUR/USD closely, so its volume can confirm what you see on the spot chart. It is not a perfect match, but it is a real count of contracts.

If you trade stocks as well, volume becomes much more reliable, because every trade is counted. Signum Lab's unusual volume screen lists US stocks trading well above their own 20-day average, which is exactly the relative comparison described above.

Putting it together

Treat forex tick volume as a measure of how busy the market is, compared with its own recent past. Use it to confirm moves you already see in price, like the EMA reclaims and breakouts the SMA Tracker watches for, not as a signal on its own.