Volume measures how many units of an instrument changed hands over a period, and that single number tells you how much participation is behind a price move. In short, volume is the conviction gauge: it separates moves the crowd genuinely backs from moves a handful of traders pushed and nobody followed.
Price tells you what happened. Volume tells you how serious it was. This guide is a practical volume indicator trading explainer for MT5 users. We will cover what volume actually measures, why rising volume confirms a move while low volume warns, how relative volume sharpens the read, the forex tick-volume nuance, and how to read volume spikes on your charts.
Each volume bar counts the trading activity that occurred during that candle. A tall bar means a lot of participants were active; a short bar means few were. On its own that figure is neutral, but paired with price action it becomes one of the most honest signals on the chart, because it is hard to fake. A breakout can be drawn on a screen, but the participation behind it either exists or it does not.
The core idea is participation. When price moves and many traders take part, that move carries the weight of a crowd that agrees on direction. When price moves and almost nobody trades, you are watching a thin drift that the next real wave of activity can easily reverse. Volume is how you tell those two situations apart.
The classic principle is that volume should expand in the direction of the trend. A rally that pushes to new highs on rising volume is being fuelled by fresh buyers stepping in, which is a healthy, sustainable move. The same rally drifting to new highs on shrinking volume is a warning: the move is running on fumes, fewer buyers are willing to pay up, and a reversal becomes more likely.
This is why volume is prized as a confirmation tool rather than a standalone signal.
| Price action | Volume | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Breakout up | Rising | Confirmed, conviction |
| Breakout up | Low | Suspect, fade risk |
| Trend continuing | Expanding | Healthy |
| Trend continuing | Fading | Exhaustion warning |
| Pullback | Low | Normal, trend intact |
A particularly useful pattern: a pullback against the trend on low volume is reassuring, because it shows the counter-move lacks participation. The trend crowd has simply stepped aside, not turned. A pullback on heavy volume is a different story, hinting that real selling, or buying, has arrived.
Raw volume numbers are almost meaningless in isolation. Twenty thousand ticks is huge for one instrument at 3am and tiny for another at the London open. That is where relative volume earns its place. Relative volume compares the current bar to its own recent average, typically the last 20 or 50 bars, and expresses the result as a multiple.
By normalising against an instrument's own baseline, relative volume strips out the noise of different liquidity levels and session times. It answers the only question that matters in the moment: is participation unusually high or unusually low right now? That framing makes relative volume far more actionable than the raw count beneath each candle.
Market Structure Pro reads relative volume across every MT5 instrument and folds it into one clear verdict.
Start your free 7-day trialHere is the honest caveat every MT5 forex trader needs. The foreign exchange market is decentralised, with no single exchange tallying every contract, so your broker cannot report true traded volume the way a stock or futures exchange can. Instead, most retail MT5 feeds report tick volume: the number of times price changed during a bar, not the number of units traded.
That sounds like a problem, but tick volume is a genuinely useful proxy. On liquid instruments, the number of price changes correlates strongly with actual traded volume, because active periods produce more ticks and quiet periods produce fewer. Studies and practitioner experience both find tick volume tracks real volume closely enough on major pairs and indices to be reliable for the participation read described above.
A volume spike is a bar with dramatically higher participation than its neighbours, often a relative volume of 3.0 or more. Spikes mark moments when a large number of participants all acted at once, and they tend to appear at three telling places:
The interpretation depends on context. A spike into a fresh breakout supports continuation; an enormous spike after a long, stretched run can signal the last participants piling in just before the move exhausts. Volume tells you the energy is there, but price and structure tell you which way that energy is resolving.
MetaTrader 5 ships with a native Volumes indicator in the Volume section of its indicator list. Add it and a histogram appears below price, colouring each bar green when volume rises versus the prior bar and red when it falls. By default it shows tick volume; you can switch it to real volume on instruments that supply it. For relative volume you will usually want a custom indicator or a tool that calculates the multiple against a moving average of volume, since the default histogram shows raw counts only.
Volume is at its strongest as a confirmation layer, never a trigger on its own. Pair it with a price-based reference such as VWAP to see not just how much participation occurred but where the bulk of it traded. For a wider comparison of what belongs on an MT5 chart, see our guide to the best MT5 indicators for 2026.
Honest framing: in Market Structure Pro, volume is one input, not the headline. MSP reads relative volume as a single confluence factor, judging whether participation is backing the current move, and it runs a dedicated low-volume filter that flags thin, unreliable conditions before they trap you. When participation collapses, the engine downgrades its own confidence rather than handing you a clean-looking signal built on no one trading.
That volume read is fused with 26 other tools, including VWAP, ADX, MACD, divergence and multi-timeframe confluence, to produce one verdict, TRADE, TRANSITION or NO TRADE, plus a confidence level, an A, B or C grade, and a plain-English explanation of why. The engine is non-repainting and works on every MT5 instrument. Volume tells you whether the crowd showed up; MSP tells you whether the whole picture agrees.
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