Tick Volume
Volume Spread Analysis glossary · Effort vs Result & Spread/Close Analysis
Definition
A proxy for transaction volume used in markets without centralised volume reporting (notably spot forex), defined as the number of price changes recorded during a bar regardless of the size of each trade. Research has consistently shown a strong correlation between tick volume and actual transaction volume across all major forex pairs (EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY): when professional money is active they execute many trades and the price changes many times; when they are absent the market drifts with few price changes. Every VSA signal — tests, stopping volume, no demand, up-thrusts — can be identified on forex charts using tick volume in place of transaction volume, with the same relative-volume thresholds applied to a 20-period tick-volume baseline.
Tick Volume in plain English
In some markets (like spot forex, where you trade one currency for another) there's no central referee counting how many shares changed hands, so you can't see true volume. Tick volume is a clever stand-in: it counts how many times the price changed during a bar, ignoring the size of each trade. The logic is that when big professional players are active, they fire off tons of orders and the price jumps around a lot; when they're absent, the price barely moves — and studies confirm this closely tracks real volume on the major pairs. So every VSA signal you'd normally read from real volume works the same way here, just using tick counts compared against a recent 20-bar average.
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