On a stock chart, volume means shares traded — the exchange reports every share that passed through. Forex has no exchange. It is an over-the-counter market spread across banks, brokers and liquidity providers, and no one sits in the middle counting. So the "volume" bars on your MT4 or MT5 chart are not contracts or lots traded at all. They are tick volume: the number of times the price changed during that bar.
Tick volume vs real volume
Tick volume counts price updates, not size. A bar with 900 ticks saw the quote move 900 times; it does not tell you whether those moves were one lot or a thousand. Real volume — actual contracts traded — does exist, but only for a venue that clears trades: futures on the CME, or the slice of flow that passes through one ECN or broker. There is no single figure for "the forex market" because there is no single forex market to measure.
Why the number still has some use
Tick volume tracks activity, and activity tends to rise with real volume in liquid pairs, so a tick spike usually marks a genuinely busy moment — a session open, a news release. Studies on the major pairs have found tick volume and real futures volume move closely together. So it works as a rough proxy for how much is going on. Just be clear about what you are reading: a "volume spike" on MT4 is an activity spike, not proof that large size traded.
Every volume indicator on MT4 — OBV, volume bars, the lot — is built on tick counts. Treat them as measures of price activity, not of money committed.
A worked example
Here is where it bites. Tick volume depends on your broker's feed, and feeds differ. Broker A might show 1,200 ticks in the London open hour on EURUSD; Broker B, for the same hour and pair, might show 3,500 — same market, different plumbing. Now say you run an EA with a filter: "only trade when volume is above 2,000". Optimised on Broker B it trades most days; moved to Broker A it barely trades at all. If that filter normally lets through around twenty good setups a month worth an average of £45 each, and the feed mismatch quietly blocks six of them, that is roughly £270 a month lost to plumbing, not to the market. The filter was never wrong — the volume was never comparable.
Common misconceptions
- MT4 volume is not lots traded. It is tick count. This trips up almost everyone at first.
- Volume is not comparable across brokers. A threshold tuned on one feed can behave completely differently on another.
- A tick spike is not a direction. Heavy activity happens at tops, bottoms and the middle of nowhere alike.
The Karnek note
Karnek reports the trades your account actually placed and the results they produced, not the tick counts a chart happens to show. It reads your live terminal only, so it can monitor a volume-filtered EA without ever sending, changing or closing an order.
Written and reviewed by the Karnek Research team. Last updated August 2026.
Educational content only - not financial advice. Past performance does not predict future results. Trading carries significant risk.