Tick Volume

Tick volume counts price updates, not traded quantity. Because spot forex is decentralised and has no central exchange reporting executed size, retail platforms display the number of times the quote changed during a bar and label it volume — a measure of quoting activity rather than of money transacted. It is a usable proxy and a poor substitute. Quote updates correlate reasonably well with genuine activity, so tick volume distinguishes busy sessions from quiet ones and gives volume-based studies something to work with. But the count belongs to one feed: two brokers show different tick volumes for the same hour on the same pair, an aggregator drawing on more liquidity providers prints more updates than one drawing on fewer, and any comparison across sources or any backtest carried between servers inherits that difference. Exchange-traded instruments — futures, and the index products derived from them — report real volume, which is why some traders use futures volume as the reference for the spot pair.