Tick Volume, the volume you see in your MT4/MT5 terminal by pressing Ctrl+L, is the sum of price changes within a particular price bar/candle. It does neither contain the direction of the trade behind this price change, nor the size traded at this particular price. It's just the sum of price updates coming in at your terminal. So with every price change in your chart, you'll see the tick volume count +1.
The major problem is that this tick volume differs significantly between various brokers. We monitored that with a tool in the past and concluded that you get more ticks the closer you are to the real interbank market data feed. In other words, the fewer ticks you get, the more your data feed is filtered (or eventually manipulated) because your broker drops price changes, and you are missing valuable data. If you like to compare it yourself, use a regular market maker trading account and compare it with a direct market access account.
The result of these differences between brokers is that if the tick volume varies all indicators based on this data will provide you with different results for each broker.
So how can one rely on this data if it shows completely different results on different brokers that all reflect the same trading market?
Simple answer, you can't, and that's why tick volume is useless in our opinion because every strategy containing this data might work on one broker but will provide completely different results on another broker.
From my point of view, tick volume has nothing to do with volume at all.
Real trading volume, as we provide with FX Volume, is a whole different story.
Since October 2018, our servers analyze and record real retail trading volume data feeds from several different sources all around the world. The data is from many brokers all across the globe. Forex is a decentralized market, and we gather what we get.
In 2020 we recorded and analyzed a total trading volume between 250,000 and 1,000,000 lots in real-time. 1 Lot is equal to a contract size of 100.000 in the corresponding currency. So we are analyzing currently a trading volume of around 25.000.000.000 and 100.000.000.000 USD in unleveraged trading positions. Still a small part of this multi-billion dollar market, but it provides excellent insight, and you can directly see on your charts how price and volume correlate.
This raw, real trading volume contains in-depth trading information including the direction and size of the trades that are currently open in any trading pair and based on this detailed information we can calculate a volume-weighted index for the eight most important Forex trading currencies.
Another important benefit of FX Volume is that you always get identical results across all terminals and brokers you use. So if you include this valuable information into your trading strategy on broker one, you'll get the same results on broker two as well, and that's what counts.
If you like to get more information about FX Volume
I recommend visiting our FX Volume info channel
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