Why Aggregate Forex Trade Counts Are Unavailable

Summary

The discussion asks whether the total number of individual foreign-exchange trades can be obtained, ideally broken down by currency. The answer explains that the over-the-counter structure of the FX market prevents a complete market-wide transaction count: trading takes place across many dealers and electronic venues, and no single source observes all activity.

Data from an individual broker or electronic communication network describes only trades handled by that venue. It cannot be treated as a comprehensive count of global FX transactions, regardless of whether the requested aggregation is annual or at a finer granularity. The practical implication is that transaction counts or volume figures from a venue can be useful for analyzing that venue, but they do not establish total market activity. The response does not identify alternative estimation methods or discuss specific datasets, so it addresses the availability limitation rather than proposing a way to estimate a global count.

Key ideas

• The fragmented over-the-counter FX market has no single comprehensive record of all transactions.
• Broker and venue data covers only activity that passes through that source.
• A venue-level trade count should not be interpreted as a global FX transaction total.
• The answer explains the data limitation but does not provide an estimation method or dataset.

Tags

# Total number of currency transactions


# Total number of currency transactions












All of the Forex volume/transactions are always reported in total dollar amount. I am interested in the number of individual trades. Where can I find this?

Granularity doesn't matter, transactions/year would be small enough. I would prefer to separate out by currency.

## Answer by Matt Wolf (score 1)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/8500

There is no such thing as total trading volume and especially no aggregate transactions.

The reason for that is that Foreign Exchange is a purely OTC (over the counter) market so even you see volume by one broker/ECN that is only volume that crosses the ECN or transactions at the particular broker. Nobody knows exactly how much volume is transacted during any given time period or on a given day/week/month/year.

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