What is Volume?

The amount of trading activity behind each candle — the conviction gauge that separates real moves from empty ones.

Volume measures how much trading activity occurred in a given period — the number of contracts, shares or coins that changed hands, usually drawn as bars beneath the price chart. Price tells you what the market did; volume tells you how many participants stood behind it. A breakout on expanding volume carries the weight of real commitment, while the same breakout on thin volume suggests few participants believe in it — a classic warning sign of a trap in the making.

One honest caveat matters for forex traders: the spot forex market is decentralised, so platforms show tick volume (the number of price changes) rather than true traded volume; in practice tick volume tracks real activity closely enough to remain useful. Volume analysis pairs naturally with the liquidity concepts we teach — spikes of volume at swept lows often mark the moment large players absorbed the panic selling — and it is the foundation of Volume Spread Analysis, which reads the relationship between each candle's volume and its range to infer what strong hands are doing.