Top 10 Most-Traded Currencies

I saw the graph below in an article in the Wall Street Journal today. It shows the top 10 most-traded currencies in the world] and their historical rankings. The data were compiled from an annual survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) which also shows that the average trading volume in the forex market is now $5.3 trillion a day. That's an increase of 33% since 2010.



Interesting to see the Yuan and the Peso crack the top 10. I've never placed a live MXN trade, since I try to stick to the majors. I might reconsider that stance now. How about you guys? Which of these 10 currencies do you trade? Do you trade any currencies that aren't in the top 10?

 

The spreads are killing your profits: USDMXN is about 50 pips!

Felix

 

until recently the swedish krona+hong kong dollar would be on list.

 

You need to look at spreads in terms of %-of-market.
Measuring in pips is meaningless, when usdmxn is 13.xxxx

That's about 10 times eurusd value. Scaling it, it makes usdmxn equivalent to eurusd 5 pips.


Frankly, clinging to the regime of 'low pip spread markets' is what kills profits, or at least, profit potential.
IMO.

 

I always suspected the NZD was overrated as a "major". Thanks for the info, Jason.

 

It's a very heavy hitter pound-for-pound... ½ the population of New Jersey.

 

the russian ruble will leapfrog to this list within a couple of years.

 

Dev makes a great point. In addition to looking at the spread in pips, you have to consider the pip cost for the currency pair in question. For example, the pip cost on a 1k microlot trade in USD/MXN is less than 1 cent. To be more precise, at an exchange rate of 13.4086, the pip cost is 0.744 cents or 0.00744 US Dollars.

That's compared to a pip cost of 10 cents for a 1k microlot trade in EUR/USD. If the EUR/USD spread is 1.5 pips, you would pay 15 cents in spread cost. With a 50 pip spread on USD/MXN, you would pay around 37 cents. That's more than for the Euro, but not so high as to make trading the Mexican Peso impossible.

The table below is from the simple dealing rates window on the FXCM Trading Station. It shows the Pip Costs for each of the top 10 currencies named in the article above. Note that the pip costs are rounded to the closest cent. The pip costs for the Mexican Peso (USD/MXN) displays as 1 cent when it's closer to 0.7 cents. The Chinese Yuan (USD/CNH) pip cost displays as 2 cents when it's actually closer to 1.6 cents.

 

Yes, it's truly remarkable. It has to do with all the cross border trading New Zealand does particularly with Australia and countries in Asia.

 

If their governments relax their trading restrictions, we might see the Indian Rupee and the Brazilian Real on this list too someday.