Why is there no volume on Forex?

I trade stocks and options and have been considering trading the Forex. However, the few Forex services that offer free virtual trading accounts do not offer volume histeograms for the charts.

I know this is a very basic question, but is this typical for currency trading, and if volume is not used in currency trading, doesn't that make it extremely difficult to confirm moves? (I have come to rely on volume as my primary indicator for intraday stock trading and cannot imagine trading without it.) Do currency traders use some other indicator as a standard instead of volume?

Thanks,

Worldcrusher

 

no vol is reported in fx by anyone

 

Who would report the volume? <strike>Bucketshop</strike> FX Dealer A has no idea what volume B is doing. It's like asking how much was bet on the Illinois-Wisconsin game.....

 

You could look at futures volume... in fact trading the futures contracts isn't a bad idea.

 

there is no volume reported for currency trading because there is no central clearing of fx trades, as yet.

 

Does your bookie tell you how much he collected on a certain bet?
Does he know how much the other bookies collected on that same bet?

When they say Forex has the highest volume transacted among all the markets, it's like telling a rookie that he can start with a small trading capital and watch it grow to millions...

Forex volume is contained within your chosen "liquidity provider"
-latest politically correct name for the Bshop or "market maker"?

when you join a table of unkown players playing poker, you could be the patsy. Do you run over to another table and say you have a better hand?

 

For the same reason there is no accurate swaps data; all of the trades are decentralized and OTC.

 

it's nobody business who bought or sold currencies.

it's a banking privacy issue.

insider rules don't apply in currencies cause there is no insider information.

 

thank you. I had the same question too...this was very informative!

 

Not entirely true.

There is no consolidated volume information. However
several ECN's publish realtime deal flow information.
These volume figures are highly correlated with each
other and probably also closely correlated with the
unobservable total forex market volume. This is not
the same thing as consolidated volume, but might be
useful to you.

And the CME publishes volume on their currency futures
contracts.