What Volume Buys
The BIS Triennial Survey, April 2025 · turnover shares by currency and by pair · a currency note · Data: BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey 2025 · Chart: ChartHorizon
The question arrives in some form most weeks, and it arrived again this one: which are the safe currencies to trade? It almost always comes with a second half attached — and how much of the market do they actually move?
The second half has a precise answer. It is published twice a decade by the Bank for International Settlements, and the most recent one landed in September 2025, covering April of that year: the Triennial Central Bank Survey, 52 jurisdictions, more than 1,100 banks and dealers reporting what actually crossed their sales desks. It is the only census this market has.
The first half has no such answer, and the reason is worth the article. Almost everyone who asks it reaches for the volume table to answer it. Volume is an excellent instrument. It is simply measuring something else.
Nine point six trillion, and the part you can trade
Turnover in over-the-counter FX averaged $9,595bn a day in April 2025 — up 28 per cent from $7,468bn three years earlier, and the highest the BIS has recorded since it began counting in 1986.
That is the headline, and it is the number that gets quoted. It is also not the market a speculator operates in. Most of it is plumbing:
| Instrument | April 2022 | April 2025 | Share, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| FX swaps | $3,798bn | $3,986bn | 42% |
| Spot | $2,085bn | $2,957bn | 31% |
| Outright forwards | $1,157bn | $1,847bn | 19% |
| Options and other | $303bn | $634bn | 7% |
| Currency swaps | $124bn | $172bn | 2% |
| All FX instruments | $7,468bn | $9,595bn | 100% |
FX swaps — the largest single block, and predominantly short-dated, under seven days — are how banks and funds manage currency funding. Outright forwards are how a business or a portfolio locks a rate it already owes. Neither is anybody’s view on price. Strip them out and the spot market, where directional trading actually lives, is $2,957bn a day: substantial, and less than a third of the number on the poster.
Two further deductions belong in the same paragraph. Non-market-facing trades — back-to-back transfers between a dealer’s own desks, plus portfolio compression — were $1.2 trillion, 13 per cent of the total, and by definition contribute nothing to price formation. And trading with non-financial customers, the real economy the market ostensibly exists to serve, was 5 per cent. Dealers trading with each other were 46 per cent; dealers trading with other financial institutions, 50.
One honesty note before the tables, because it governs how to read all of them. When a retail account clicks a price, it is not trading in this market. It is trading with a broker, who prices off this market and may or may not pass the position into it. What follows describes the depth underneath the quote — which is what determines whether the quote holds when it matters. It does not describe the pool you are swimming in.
The volume table
Because two currencies are involved in every trade, the shares below sum to 200 per cent, not 100. A currency’s figure is the share of all turnover in which it was one of the two legs.
| Currency | 2022 | 2025 | Δ | Turnover, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US dollar | 88.4% | 89.2% | +0.8 | $8,560bn |
| Euro | 30.6% | 28.9% | −1.7 | $2,773bn |
| Japanese yen | 16.7% | 16.8% | +0.1 | $1,610bn |
| Pound sterling | 12.9% | 10.2% | −2.7 | $981bn |
| Chinese renminbi | 7.0% | 8.5% | +1.5 | $817bn |
| Swiss franc | 5.2% | 6.4% | +1.2 | $612bn |
| Australian dollar | 6.4% | 6.1% | −0.3 | $583bn |
| Canadian dollar | 6.2% | 5.8% | −0.4 | $561bn |
| Hong Kong dollar | 2.6% | 3.8% | +1.2 | $367bn |
| Singapore dollar | 2.4% | 2.4% | 0.0 | $232bn |
| Indian rupee | 1.6% | 1.9% | +0.3 | $185bn |
| Korean won | 1.8% | 1.8% | 0.0 | $171bn |
| Swedish krona | 2.2% | 1.6% | −0.6 | $155bn |
| Mexican peso | 1.5% | 1.6% | +0.1 | $153bn |
| New Zealand dollar | 1.7% | 1.5% | −0.2 | $147bn |
| Norwegian krone | 1.7% | 1.3% | −0.4 | $125bn |
The dollar is the whole structure. It stands on one side of 89.2 per cent of every trade made in this market, and its share went up. The next three moves are the ones worth marking: sterling fell 2.7 points to 10.2 per cent, dropping below the 13 per cent it had averaged across the three surveys since 2016; the renminbi continued a climb that has taken it from 2.2 per cent in 2013 to fifth place; and the Swiss franc rose to sixth, from eighth in 2022.
The pairs
Every one of the ten largest pairs in the world has the dollar on one side of it.
| Pair | 2022 | 2025 | Turnover, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| EUR/USD | 22.7% | 21.2% | $2,033bn |
| USD/JPY | 13.5% | 14.3% | $1,372bn |
| USD/CNY | 6.6% | 8.1% | $781bn |
| GBP/USD | 9.5% | 7.6% | $731bn |
| USD/CAD | 5.5% | 5.3% | $505bn |
| AUD/USD | 5.1% | 4.9% | $467bn |
| USD/CHF | 3.9% | 4.9% | $467bn |
| USD/HKD | 2.4% | 3.6% | $347bn |
| USD/SGD | 2.3% | 2.2% | $215bn |
| USD/INR | 1.5% | 1.9% | $181bn |
| EUR/GBP | 2.1% | 1.8% | $169bn |
| USD/KRW | 1.7% | 1.7% | $165bn |
| USD/MXN | 1.4% | 1.5% | $140bn |
| NZD/USD | 1.3% | 1.2% | $118bn |
| EUR/JPY | 1.4% | 1.0% | $99bn |
| EUR/CHF | 0.9% | 1.0% | $97bn |
Three freely floating pairs — EUR/USD, USD/JPY and GBP/USD — are 43.1 per cent of everything between them, and note that USD/CNY outranks the last of the three; it is dealt with below. Add USD/CAD, AUD/USD and USD/CHF and six pairs carry 58.2 per cent of a $9.6 trillion market. Everything else on the table, and the several hundred pairs below it, divide the remaining two fifths.
What volume buys
A large number in that table buys three specific things, and they are the things a trader notices day to day: a spread measured in fractions of a pip rather than whole ones, a fill near the price you asked for in a size that would move a thinner market, and a book that is quoted continuously rather than in the hours somebody else keeps.
That is a real purchase. It is not nothing, and for most decisions it is the right thing to optimise for.
But note what is missing from that list. Volume does not buy you a currency that is permitted to move. It does not buy you a central bank that will not reprice the thing overnight. And it does not buy you the guarantee that the depth in the column will still be there next year. Each of those three failures has a worked example in the same survey, and two of them are sitting in the top ten.
The floor that broke
On the morning of 15 January 2015 the Swiss franc was among the most liquid currencies on earth. It had a floor under it: the Swiss National Bank had undertaken, since September 2011, to defend 1.20 on EUR/CHF, and the market had spent three years trading against a wall it believed in.
The SNB withdrew the undertaking in a statement. The franc rose roughly 20 per cent against the euro in under a minute — not a gap between sessions, a gap inside one. FXCM lost $225m on client accounts that went through zero and took a $300m rescue from Leucadia to stay inside its capital requirements. Alpari’s UK arm filed for insolvency, and its notice said the quiet part in plain words: “the majority of clients sustaining losses which has exceeded their account equity. Where a client cannot cover this loss, it is passed on to us.”
The relevant detail for this article is that none of that risk was visible in the volume column. The franc was deep on 14 January and deep on 16 January. What changed was a policy that could be — and was — withdrawn in a sentence. It is now the sixth most traded currency in the world, up two places since 2022, and the SNB has not stopped intervening. Volume was not the protection anybody thought it was.
The band that holds
The Hong Kong dollar was the fastest-growing major pair in the survey. USD/HKD turnover rose 95 per cent to $347bn a day; the currency’s overall share went from 2.6 to 3.8 per cent, ninth in the world.
It is also pegged, in a band running 7.75 to 7.85 to the dollar. That is a permitted range of about 1.3 per cent, defended by an authority with the reserves to defend it. The enormous turnover is very largely the peg’s own machinery — arbitrage and carry against a fixed rate — rather than a two-way market forming a price. There is real money to be made around the band’s edges by people who fund at wholesale rates. There is no directional trade in it for anybody else, and its position in the table says otherwise.
The float that is managed
The renminbi is now the fifth most traded currency and USD/CNY the third largest pair on earth, $781bn a day. It is not a free float: there is a daily central parity fix, a permitted band around it, and a hard distinction between the onshore currency and the offshore one that most foreign accounts actually deal in. The price on your screen and the price the fix is set at are related but they are not the same instrument, and the relationship is a policy variable.
Singapore is the quieter member of the same family — the Monetary Authority runs policy through the exchange rate rather than through interest rates, steering the dollar within an undisclosed band against an undisclosed basket. $215bn a day, and a hand on it.
The liquidity that was withdrawn
This is the one that should settle the argument.
| Russian rouble | 2013 | 2016 | 2019 | 2022 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turnover per day | $86bn | $58bn | $72bn | $13bn | $3bn |
| Share of global | 1.6% | 1.1% | 1.1% | 0.2% | 0.0% |
In 2013 the rouble was a larger market than the New Zealand dollar. Somebody reading the volume table that year, applying the reasoning this article is arguing against, would have concluded it was a perfectly sensible thing to hold a position in — and would have been right, for about eight years. Then it was 0.0 per cent, and positions in it were not closed at a bad price, they were simply not closeable.
Liquidity is not a property of a currency. It is a permission, and it is granted by parties who are not consulting you.
The list, then
With all of that said, the question deserves a straight answer, and the data supports one.
First rank. Freely floating, no band, no fix, deepest continuously quoted books, and a central bank that announces itself on a published calendar:
- EUR/USD — 21.2 per cent of global turnover, $2,033bn a day. The reference pair; the tightest spread available anywhere in this market.
- USD/JPY — 14.3 per cent, $1,372bn. Equally deep, with one asterisk this desk has written about at length: the Japanese Ministry of Finance is an occasional participant, and it does not trade small.
- GBP/USD — 7.6 per cent, $731bn. Genuinely deep, though it is the major whose share fell hardest this cycle.
Those three are 43.1 per cent of the market between them.
Second rank. Also freely floating, deep enough for any position a private account will take, but wider spreads and — this matters more than the annual figure suggests — liquidity that concentrates in particular hours:
- USD/CAD — 5.3 per cent, $505bn.
- AUD/USD — 4.9 per cent, $467bn.
- USD/CHF — 4.9 per cent, $467bn, with 2015 kept in view.
- NZD/USD — 1.2 per cent, $118bn. The thinnest of the majors; a New Zealand dollar position held through a European evening is in a market considerably shallower than its yearly share implies.
Large, and not on this list. USD/CNY at 8.1 per cent, USD/HKD at 3.6 and USD/SGD at 2.2 are the third, eighth and ninth largest pairs in the world. All three are on a leash. The volume is real; the two-way market is not the same size as the volume.
Where the depth is, and when
The survey also answers the question of when, though it answers it geographically. Sales desks in four jurisdictions intermediated three quarters of all FX trading: the United Kingdom at about 38 per cent, the United States at about 19, Singapore at 11.8 — up from 9.5 and past a trillion dollars a day for the first time — and Hong Kong at 7.0. Sixty-three per cent of turnover was cross-border.
The practical reading is that depth follows those desks around the clock. The London morning through the New York afternoon is where the numbers in this article are true. The same pair at 22:00 Berlin time is a different instrument with the same name, and it is where the gap between a currency’s annual share and its liquidity at the moment you need it opens widest.
A caveat on the photograph
April 2025 was not an ordinary month, and the BIS says so itself: the survey was conducted “amidst elevated FX volatility and a surge in trading activity that followed trade policy announcements early in that month.” Outright forwards rising 58.7 per cent and options more than doubling are partly a picture of institutions hedging dollar exposure in a hurry, not only a structural shift. Treat the instrument mix with more caution than the currency ranks, which move slowly.
And this is a photograph taken twice a decade. The next one is April 2028. Between now and then the ranks will drift, and — on the evidence of the rouble — something in the table will do rather more than drift.
Volume tells you where the depth is. Pegs, bands, fixes and sanctions tell you where that depth is allowed to go. The currencies that are actually safe to trade are the ones where both questions have the same answer, and the list is shorter than the volume table makes it look: six pairs, 58 per cent of the market, and no leash on any of them.
The rest of the table is a description of the world’s plumbing. It is fascinating, and most of it is not an invitation.
Current dollar crosses and the cross-rate board are on the FX Map.
Informational and educational only — not financial advice. Futures trading involves substantial risk of loss; seasonal and positioning signals do not guarantee future results. Signals and charts: ChartHorizon (local end-of-day data).