Tick volume counts updates, not contracts
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 7:43 pm
Every forex chart that shows volume is showing tick volume, and that's a different thing from traded size. One tick is a price change. A tiny quote update counts the same as a giant fill.
Still, tick volume correlates reasonably well with real activity on a single broker's feed. More participants means more quote changes, so busy periods produce high counts. That's why it works as a rough activity gauge.
Where it misleads is across brokers and across time. Feeds filtered differently give different counts for the same minute. A broker that upgrades its pricing engine can see tick counts double overnight with no change in the market.
Practical use: treat it as relative, not absolute. Compare the current minute with the same time on previous days on the same feed. A spike against that baseline says something. A raw number on its own says nothing.
It also fails at the extremes. Dead markets produce low ticks, but so do markets where a single huge order moves price in one gulp.
Some traders go further and compare tick volume with the number of distinct price levels visited per minute. When ticks surge but price barely moves, quotes are churning without conviction, and breakouts in that environment tend to fail more often.
Does tick volume feature in any of your entry or filter rules, and has it held up?
Still, tick volume correlates reasonably well with real activity on a single broker's feed. More participants means more quote changes, so busy periods produce high counts. That's why it works as a rough activity gauge.
Where it misleads is across brokers and across time. Feeds filtered differently give different counts for the same minute. A broker that upgrades its pricing engine can see tick counts double overnight with no change in the market.
Practical use: treat it as relative, not absolute. Compare the current minute with the same time on previous days on the same feed. A spike against that baseline says something. A raw number on its own says nothing.
It also fails at the extremes. Dead markets produce low ticks, but so do markets where a single huge order moves price in one gulp.
Some traders go further and compare tick volume with the number of distinct price levels visited per minute. When ticks surge but price barely moves, quotes are churning without conviction, and breakouts in that environment tend to fail more often.
Does tick volume feature in any of your entry or filter rules, and has it held up?