I tried changing the volume settings to ‘tick volume’ but it doesn’t work. Maybe it only works properly with certain data providers? I was using IQFeed at the time, which did work if i chose real volume in the settings, but it’s my understanding that most forex data providers don’t provide volume and you must instead rely on tick data - IQFeed is one of the few who do provide ‘real volume’ for forex.

I don't know anything about multicharts, but you understand that there is no actual volume figure for spot forex, right?

Of course, there really is ( ), so let me explain this a little better.

There is no central market for spot forex trades, no exchange that all forex trades are made on (I'm not talking forex futures, but actually buying and selling forex pairs, where you buy one currency with another.) Instead, you are doing business with your forex broker, who is the party on the other side. Perhaps the broker is actually trading against you ("dealing desk") or is passing on your trades to some external liquidity provider(s) ("no dealing desk"), but either way, your trades are taking place within a limited group of trades that are executed within a limited segment of the forex market. Your broker or data provider does not have access to the entire forex market, and you are not executing there anyway. You are trading within a mini-market that is organized by your dealer.

(You should see the terms "dealing desk" and "no dealing desk" in the previous paragraph that are underlined with a reference to the FIO wiki entries if you would like a fuller explanation.)

So sure, there is actual volume for spot forex, but it's the total cumulative volume of all the participants in forex trading, which is essentially dominated by trading between the big banks anyway and which is certainly not disclosed anywhere, much less in one cumulative number. It's also not the group of traders you are trading with .

Given this, I do not know where IQFeed obtains their volume number. It definitely is not the actual total forex volume for a given pair, because they don't have that, and no one does. They are a well-thought-of data provider, so I assume the number means something, but it isn't total actual spot forex volume in the entire forex market.

It is possible to get the futures volume for currency futures -- for example, the Euro contract, 6E, on the CME -- because those contracts are traded on an exchange -- and that volume will have some connection to the forex pair volume in spot forex. But it's definitely not the same as the volume that is transacted either on the entire spot forex pairs market, nor, more to the point, the volume that is being transacted within the mini-market of your particular dealer, which is the market you are trading in. So its value to you may be better than nothing, and if you want a volume number it's probably the best you're going to get, but it isn't the actual transacted volume of a market you are actually trading in. You are not trading in a broad market with a large number of other traders whose trades are being matched to each other. You're trading with your dealer, or with whatever liquidity providers he's passing your trades off to.

Sorry if this answer got too long, but this is why you're not going to see any actual spot forex volume.

Bob.

Yeah, I’m aware that the volume that a particular liquidity provider provides you with is not the volume for the entire spot market, however it is said that if you can see just part of the volume then that can provide an indication of what may be going on at large.

You say that it’s definitely not the ‘real volume’ being provided by IQFeed, but I wonder what makes you say that because I see no reason why they can’t provide you with real volume as the liquidity providers do have knowledge of what’s going on in their own order books.

Also, my understanding of tick volume is that it can provide an estimate to real volume and that it’s not exact because during each ‘tick’ it’s unknown just how many lots were traded during that change in bid/ask price. However there have been studies showing that despite this, it actually does paint quite an accurate picture of the real volume (By real volume i don’t mean volume occurring in the entire market but the real volume for that specific broker/liquidity provider)