On centralised exchanges, volume is a real count of shares or contracts traded and reported to everyone. In CFDs and spot forex there is no central exchange, so your broker cannot show true market-wide volume. What you see is almost always tick volume instead.
Tick volume is simply a count of price changes — how many times the price updated during a period, not how much money changed hands. If the price ticked 400 times in an hour, the tick volume for that hour is roughly 400. It is a proxy for activity, not a true traded quantity.
Why the distinction matters
Tick volume tends to correlate with real activity in liquid markets, because busy periods produce more price changes. But it is only a proxy: a market can tick rapidly on small orders, and two brokers can report different tick counts for the same instrument because they see different feeds.
- Tick volume counts price updates, not contracts or lots traded.
- It usually rises and falls with genuine participation in liquid markets.
- Different brokers can show different tick volume for the same asset.
- Treat it as a rough gauge of activity, never as exact traded size.
The honest takeaway: you can still use volume concepts on CFDs, but read them as relative and approximate. Compare each bar to recent ones rather than trusting absolute numbers, and be more sceptical than a futures or stock trader who sees true exchange volume.
CFD and forex volume is usually tick volume — a count of price changes, not real traded size — so treat it as a useful proxy with real limits.