The state of FX liquidity: the market in numbers

The scale of the FX market

Foreign exchange is the connective tissue of global finance: every cross-border payment, hedge, investment and trade settlement ultimately passes through it. Because there is no single central exchange, its size is measured through survey rather than tape — most authoritatively by the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey, which central banks around the world compile every three years. The most recent published survey covers April 2022, and the numbers below are drawn from it, labelled by survey year.

1. Market size over time

Global daily FX turnover reached about US$7.5 trillion per day in April 2022. Turnover has grown across most survey cycles and has roughly doubled since 2010.

2. Most-traded currencies

The US dollar remains on the large majority of all trades. Because each FX trade involves two currencies, the shares below count one side of each trade and therefore sum to 200% across all currencies.

3. Most-traded currency pairs

Turnover is concentrated in a handful of dollar-based pairs. EUR/USD alone accounts for roughly a quarter of all FX trading, and the US dollar appears in every one of the largest pairs.

4. Instrument mix

Spot trading is what most people picture, but it is not the largest slice of the market. FX swaps — the simultaneous exchange and later reversal of two currencies — account for the majority of turnover, reflecting the market's heavy use for funding and hedging rather than outright directional trading.

5. Largest trading centres

FX activity is geographically concentrated in a small number of hubs. The United Kingdom is the single largest centre, handling well over a third of global turnover, with the United States and the Asian financial centres of Singapore and Hong Kong SAR following.

Why this matters for sourcing liquidity

The data describes a market that is enormous, deep and around-the-clock — but also highly concentrated and dollar-centric. That combination shapes how firms should think about accessing it. A market where the US dollar sits on roughly 88% of trades and where a handful of pairs carry most of the volume rewards providers who can consolidate the deepest sources of that pricing into one book.

No single bank or venue captures the whole market. The largest, primary source of FX pricing is the tier 1 interbank system, but non-bank electronic market makers have grown steadily in share, and electronic trading now dominates execution. Reaching both — and holding the credit needed to trade tier 1 in size — is beyond most brokers directly. This is precisely the role of prime brokerage and, for firms that fall below a tier 1 prime broker's thresholds, Prime-of-Prime intermediation: aggregating tier 1 bank and non-bank sources into a single, deep, executable feed under one relationship.

Understanding the mechanics behind that access is the subject of several companion pieces. See what is a liquidity provider for the fundamentals, how FX liquidity aggregation works for how many feeds become one book, and what is a tier 1 liquidity provider for the primary source at the top of the chain. Our liquidity solutions span the markets and instruments and countries covered above.

Sources

• Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Triennial Central Bank Survey of foreign exchange and OTC derivatives markets, April 2022.

All figures on this page are drawn from public official sources — principally the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey — and are labelled by survey year. They reflect the most recent published survey at the time of writing and are presented for general information, not as PrimeBrokerLiquidity proprietary research.