Does forex have real volume? What the MT5 volume bar actually counts
The MT5 volume bar counts price changes, not money. We set it against the BIS figures: it tracks when a pair is busy, not how much of it trades.
Not on a spot forex chart, at least not at the broker whose data we store. The volume bar in MetaTrader 5 (MT5) counts how many times the price changed, not how much money changed hands. That count is good at telling you when a pair is busy and poor at telling you how much of it trades, and our own data shows both halves.
No central exchange, no traded volume
Volume needs someone who sees every trade. A stock or futures exchange does, because every order passes through it. Spot forex has no central order book: banks, platforms and brokers deal with each other in thousands of separate places, and nobody adds the trades up in real time.
MT5 bars carry two volume fields, tick volume and real volume. The broker our feeder uses leaves the second one empty: in the 3.4 million one-minute and one-hour bars we store for twelve symbols, real volume is 0 on every one. The column the platform labels "volume" is tick volume.
The sources that do have real volume
Real volume exists, just not bar by bar on a spot chart:
| Source | What it counts | How often | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| BIS Triennial Survey | Money traded, every instrument | One month (April), every three years | The whole market |
| CME currency futures | Contracts traded | Every trading day | Futures only |
| COT report | Open positions, not trades | Weekly | US futures, mostly CME |
| MT5 volume bar | Price changes (ticks) | Every bar | One broker's price feed |
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) survey is the only measure of the whole market. In April 2025 it put global turnover at $9.6 trillion a day, $3.0 trillion of it spot, according to its detailed tables. That is one figure per pair for one month, with three years between surveys.
Currency futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) do publish real volume, because they trade on an exchange. But, as we noted in our article on following the money, they move around 3% of spot turnover. The Commitments of Traders (COT) report built on them counts positions held, once a week, not trades.
What the volume bar actually counts
A tick is a change in the quoted price, and tick volume is the number of those changes inside a bar. It carries no size: each change counts as one, whatever amount traded behind it.
So the useful question is not whether it is real volume, because it is not, but whether it moves with real volume. There are two ways to ask that, and they give opposite answers.
Across the day, it follows activity
We averaged the ticks in each hour of EUR/USD over the 74 complete Monday-to-Thursday days between 4 May and 24 September 2026. There were 84 such days; the other ten had gaps in our feed. The hours are UTC in summer time; in winter, the London and New York hours move one hour later in UTC.
| Hour (UTC) | Average ticks in the hour |
|---|---|
| 04:00 | 3,896 |
| 07:00 | 8,589 |
| 12:00 | 10,320 |
| 14:00 | 13,163 |
| 17:00 | 6,389 |
| 21:00 | 1,072 |
The table traces the day: the quiet stretch of Asia, the London open at 07:00, New York joining at 12:00, the peak at 14:00 and the floor at 21:00, the daily rollover. The 14:00 hour carries 12.3 times the ticks of the 21:00 hour. The four hours from 12:00 to 16:00, the London–New York overlap, are 17% of the day and hold 28.8% of its ticks.
The one published check we found says real money follows the same shape. In 2011, Caspar Marney compared the traded volume of two large electronic platforms, EBS and HotSpot, with the tick volume of a data vendor, eSignal, hour by hour through the day. The Pearson coefficient between the two profiles came out at 0.97 for EUR/USD, 0.96 for USD/JPY, 0.99 for GBP/USD and 0.97 for EUR/CHF (FX Trader Magazine, April–June 2011).
That study has limits worth knowing. It compares average 24-hour profiles, not bar by bar, and says itself that shorter periods need more research. It is fifteen years old, and its author's own volume indicators, built on the same idea, were available on several platforms.
The study also found that in the busiest hours traded volume rises more than ticks do, which it puts down to bigger average trades in those hours: tick volume shows the peak, and may understate it.
Across pairs, it does not rank the money
Now the other question: does a pair with more ticks trade more money? Here is our count beside the BIS spot figures, taken from Tables 3 and 4 of the same annex.
| Pair | BIS spot turnover per day, April 2025 | Our ticks per day, May–September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| EUR/USD | $578.2 billion | 161,469 |
| USD/JPY | $480.4 billion | 155,906 |
| GBP/USD | $189.6 billion | 256,833 |
| AUD/USD | $154.6 billion | 143,763 |
| USD/CAD | $141.6 billion | 164,399 |
| USD/CHF | $123.4 billion | 122,774 |
| EUR/GBP | $45.1 billion | 70,158 |
| NZD/USD | $43.3 billion | 163,571 |
| EUR/JPY | $38.4 billion | 147,521 |
| EUR/CHF | $34.1 billion | 78,585 |
GBP/USD is third by money and first by ticks, by a wide margin. NZD/USD trades about thirteen times less than EUR/USD and records slightly more ticks. EUR/JPY, the second smallest by money, prints nine ticks for every ten on EUR/USD.
The comparison is not exact. The BIS figure is the whole market in April 2025; our count is one broker's feed on the 74 Monday-to-Thursday days from May to September 2026 used for the hour table. But thirteen times the money against the same number of ticks is a gap far larger than those differences are likely to explain.
Within each pair, what the count follows is movement. In each of the twelve symbols we store, one-hour bars with a bigger range carry more ticks, with a rank coefficient between 0.30 and 0.69. At one-minute scale, our comparison of volatility, liquidity and volume measured the same on EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY and AUD/USD.
What it can and cannot do for you
Use it to:
- See when a pair wakes up and goes quiet: the trading sessions, the opens, the overlap.
- Compare a bar with the bars around it, on the same pair and the same broker. An hour with far more ticks than usual is worth checking for news.
- Read a volume profile, On-Balance Volume (OBV) or the volume-weighted average price (VWAP), knowing that on a spot chart with no real volume, what they stack is ticks: where price was active, not where the money traded.
Do not use it to:
- Compare pairs, as the table above shows, or brokers: each feed counts its own price updates.
- Read depth. The minute with the most ticks of the day can also be a thin one, as our comparison of volatility, liquidity and volume showed with the US payrolls release.
- Spot institutional orders. A tick does not say who traded or how much, whatever a tool built on it promises; see our look at smart money and liquidity.
What this article does not tell you
- It does not test our own ticks against real traded volume. We have no real volume to test them with; the time-of-day check is Marney's, on other platforms and in another decade.
- It does not say whether volume indicators work as trading signals. Whether tick volume confirms a breakout is a separate question, and it needs its own test.
- Our hours are summer UTC and our count comes from one broker's feed. Another broker may show different numbers for the same hour.
